


don't know what you're carrying or how your heart is wired

by notbang



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Swap, F/M, Fake Dating, Sharing a Bed, alternate title: uh body what?, confusing and arousing, nathaniel and his female presenting nipples are Valid, or that one (1) person asked for, the body swap au nobody asked for, they just got santa ana winded (the reprise), trapped in the body of someone you don't want to be trapped in the body of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2019-09-17 01:32:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 77,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16965198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbang/pseuds/notbang
Summary: Rebecca stares at his mouth—hermouth, plump and pink and parted ever so slightly—and the slow and steady pulse of arousal she feels isn’t entirely free of ego, it’s true. But there’s something else there in the forefront; a familiar physicality, crackling in the unoccupied spaces between their bodies like electricity, purposeful and kinetic and only intensified by the heady buzz of the alcohol. She slides a hand over his knee and shifts closer to him on the couch.“So… do you consent to this admittedly very weird activity?”The Santa Ana Winds aren’t done with them yet.





	1. your body is a battleground

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to my boo [cori_the_bloody](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cori_the_bloody) for initially co-parenting this brain child with me — this fic started out as a silly headcanon discussion that at some point on a groggy bus ride between Chiang Mai and Chiang Khong last month my muse decided was a Thing that was Happening, and here we are. Enjoy the whiplash as it oscillates wildly between complete crack and taking itself seriously! 
> 
> Picks up at some point after 4x02 and promptly does its own thing.

They never even make it out of the hotel room.

Rebecca’s never been to Hawaii before, and she’s still not entirely sure she can say she has now, given her experience has been strictly limited to the airport, a luxury transfer car and the—admittedly very impressive—interior of their presidential villa. She’d opened the wall-width balcony doors to their entirety upon arrival, but her surveyal of the sunsetted, palm-tree lined beach had ceased there; Nathaniel’s mouth on the back of her neck had raised the issue of a very different kind of heat, and bringing with it the promise of all the things that for so long they’ve lacked the convenience of a bed. 

He’s worshipful, writing every reason he has to be thankful for her into the softness of her skin and she’s giddy with promise but impatient. She needs this, needs this physical confirmation of his wanting and the way she wants him too. Needs this last one thing to ease the aching, empty part of her; make her feel full.

“Nathaniel,” she says, hooking a leg over his, opening herself up to him. Her hips cant forward and he gladly occupies the offered space.

She feels dizzy, drunk off the thought of him, and for the first time since getting out of jail it’s like coming home.

The angle is shallow and he moves agonisingly slow, his lips languid in their mapping of her collarbone. She feels like she’s burning, combusting, her breath leaving her in short, sharp pants; the drag of him inside of her is all at once too much and not enough and she moans her desperation until he swallows it whole, pulls it deep from within her lungs and draws it down into his own.

His hips snap once more into hers, hard, detonating on impact and then she’s rocket fuel, exploding, shooting through the stratosphere in pieces and reassembling out of order on reentry; Nathaniel’s dogged, persistent, until the space between her legs is nothing but white-hot static, numb with heat. There’s an uncomfortable pressure that her first instinct is to resist but his fingers are unrelenting and suddenly she can’t hold back anymore—something inside her bursts, shatters and breaks until she’s crying out, arching, and Nathaniel looks down at the sheen of her coating both their thighs, the dark dampness blossoming on the bedspread, and groans.

He praises her with his lips on hers, slick fingers tangling in her hair. “You’re amazing,” he mumbles into her mouth, his grin slow and reverent, nose nudging against hers.

She can’t speak, can’t _think,_ and she’s hot and embarrassingly sticky but it’s the bonelessness that prevails, sinking back against the fancy hotel bedlinen, scattered rose petals crushed beneath her in disarray. 

When Rebecca flies upright in the bed she’s soaked; slippery with sweat and the steady throb of arousal, sheets clinging to her in the humidity like a stifling second skin. She stumbles to the bathroom on shaky limbs, her flushed skin practically glowing neon in the glare of the light as she splashes herself with water, drags a damp washcloth between her legs with a wince.

It’s fine, she tells herself in the mirror, willing her pulse and breathing to slow. It’s been awhile. She’s always had a healthy sex drive and going cold turkey for a long stretch of weeks after eight months plus of getting some practically on the daily was an understandably difficult adjustment. At least the saving grace in her apparently doomed-to-be-recurring increasingly-pornographic Santa Ana Winds sex dreams this time is that there’s no unsuspecting fiancé stretched out next to her on the mattress, stabbing her with guilt with every inflamed-sinus snore. 

Never mind the fact that she _could_ be sprawled out on a towel on a beach in Hawaii right now, pulled-wide and pinned like a butterfly, no afterthought spared for the sand getting stuck in places it probably shouldn’t because she was gloriously, luxuriously otherwise occupied. She could have chosen cocktails and leis and getting laid but she didn’t, and that’s fine until nights like tonight when it isn’t, when righteous anger dissipates into loneliness and longing and her body betraying her in its own agitation. Not for the first time she considers calling him, considers answering the texts she’s for weeks left ignored. 

It’s always been part of the problem, how _good_ at that particular part they are—the way it has the tendency to overwhelm anything else, to the point that other preoccupations, other people didn’t matter.

She pads out into the kitchen, grateful for the absence of spilled light from beneath Heather and Hector’s door. The gust of cool air from the refrigerator is a welcome reprieve on her scalding skin, and she hovers there, still a little dazed and undecided on purpose until she manages to force her fingers to wrap around the handle of the water jug nestled in the side shelf.

The glass of water does nothing to quench the thirst burning through her, though, that doesn’t dissipate at all throughout the drive, and when she gets to his apartment and raps her knuckles against the wood he’s awake, just like some part of her knew he would be.

“I want to make it very clear that I am still upset with you,” she announces, pushing him inside and pressing the door closed behind them. “But also that I’m really horny so I’m gonna need you to fuck me right now.”

He stares at her, almost endearingly boyish in his confusion until she catches him up by pulling her shirt over her head and throwing it somewhere over her shoulder.

He swallows. “Is this some kind of test?”

“Are you seriously hesitating right now?” she asks, gesturing in disbelief at her exposed chest.

“Ask questions later, got it,” he concedes, reaching for her, getting the hint and working on discarding his own.

* * *

He starts out rougher with her than she remembers, and it becomes quickly apparent that his for the most part gentle affection for her has been tempered somewhat by the recent sting of her rejection; he shoves her towards the bed, tugs her shorts down her legs and pulls her hair to get at her throat. She shudders when he sinks his teeth into her earlobe, arching, his hands gripping her hard and hurried in his effort to disrobe her. She palms him through the black material of his boxers, only half surprised to find him just as ready as she is.

It’s a far cry from the reunion he’d hoped for, she knows, but he’s a willing participant all the same.

The last time she had sex was in a dusty supply closet, underwear dangling off one ankle and balanced precariously on top of a filing cabinet with metal shelving digging uncomfortably between her shoulder blades, so the mattress is already an immediate improvement. She’s not interested in letting him descend into any kind of tenderness, though, so as soon as the frustration ebbs and he slows and tries to kiss her properly she twists in his grip, pressing up onto her knees against the headboard and he takes the hint, wrapping around her from behind, slipping against her where she craves him most, making her moan.

“Yeah,” she breathes when he pushes into her, gratified, finally so full to the brim of him that her head snaps forward against the drywall with a dull thud. 

“Fuck, Rebecca,” he groans, fingertips sinking deep into the flesh of her hips, and she wonders if it’s been almost this long for him, too. Wonders how many times he made love to Mona here, in this bed, once she called it quits. Wonders whose company he might have sought out since.

She braces herself against the wooden slats, head dropping down in a curtain of dark hair to watch where his unforgiving fingers have found their way between her thighs.

“Missed you,” he pants, pinching at her, rolling her between his thumb and forefinger before abandoning her overwrought bundle of nerves in favour of trailing up towards her breasts.

She lets him toy with her nipple for a moment before dragging his hand back down to where she wants it and making it clear that he should keep it there. “Shut up,” she says, humming her satisfaction when he obeys and redoubles his efforts.

She’s quiet, when she comes—arms tensing ramrod straight and knuckles glowing white where they grip the wood as her thighs tremble her release until she sinks back, sated, and waits for him to follow. It doesn't take him long until he’s jerking up into her, pulsing inside of her, the broken noise he makes in her ear rough, like the grinding of stone.

“I was dreaming about you, before you came here,” he mumbles into the crease of her neck, nosing her mindlessly, one arm still slung possessively around her hips and holding her against him. He’s stroking absently at the soft swell of her belly, and something about the way he says it—the way the words curl around her in a fond caress and send her heart squeezing too tightly in her chest—has her pressing back at him until he lets her up, the tell-tale trickle of self-loathing filtering in with the cooling sweat drying sticky on the back of her neck.

“God, what am I doing,” she says, pushing her damp hair up over her forehead before bending to gather her clothes. “This was a mistake.”

She hates how she can see the slow spread of confusion on his face without even turning to look at him.

“Rebecca, come on,” he says, incredulous, hurt, exasperated; empty arms still folded around the space where she had just been. “We’re not doing this again.”

“I’m still… I’m still trying to figure things out, about what I want for my life and how you fit into that, and this… this was a bad idea. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here. I have to go.”

The sigh that comes out of him is vaguely incensed but for the most part wounded, and the guilt coagulates uncomfortably in her stomach. She’s made an unfair habit of this, of fucking and running, but being here right now feels a little too much like backsliding and she has to get out.

Nathaniel drops out of the bed to follow her, hand scrunching in his hair. “You and I both know this little spat will last another week, tops, and then you’ll be over it so let’s just stop wasting time and skip all that. We’ve already wasted so much time—don’t you see that? I don’t care about what happened in the courtroom, or Hawaii, okay? You’re here now, so just come back to bed and let’s just _be together._ ”

She wants to. _God,_ is there a part of her that wants to—the same part that got swept up in his declaration in the interrogation room, that singsonged at the promise of Hawaii, that was ready to run away with him to Rome. But there’s another part of her, now, that for so long she hasn’t known how to listen to, and it’s growing stronger, and clearer, and knows so much more about what it wants. When that part of her looks at Nathaniel it gets fuzzy and fades into static and she gets nervous at the way that makes her feel.

“It’s not that simple,” she tells him.

He rolls his eyes at her, pulling on his boxers. “Okay. Whatever you say.”

She frowns. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means, you always do this—you push me away, then you come crawling right back to me. One minute we’re on a break because you’re trying to ‘find yourself’—” His mocking use of air quotes has her eyebrows climbing her forehead in disbelief as he gestures with irritated gusto towards the door. “—the next minute you’re on my doorstep late at night literally jumping me. Forgive me for being a little skeptical of your self control.”

Just like that, his accusations on the porch come rushing back to her in furious Technicolor, and the shift in her mood from apologetic to righteous indignation is swift. “You’re right,” she says, expression hardening. “Maybe you have been collateral damage in me trying to sort myself out and I am sorry if I have hurt you. But your interpretation of that is _so_ messed up and offensive, and I’m just going to make it easy on the both of us. We’re done.”

“Rebecca…”

“I mean it, Nathaniel. It’s over. You and I, we just… keep going in these messed up circles and we don’t actually move anywhere.”

“Well whose fault is that?” He pulls his jeans up over his hips, not bothering with the zipper. “I don’t understand what else you want from me, Rebecca.”

“Nothing,” she says, yanking on her boots. “It doesn’t matter anymore. I used to think we understood each other, maybe. But I was wrong. You do not get me at all.”

“Yeah? Well you know what? You don’t get me, either,” he bites back. “Or you wouldn’t be here, doing this to me _again_. So fine. We’re done. Wonderful. You can see yourself out.”

_“Fine.”_

She hates how unsteady on her legs she feels as she stomps out and slams his door.


	2. this body is yours and mine

The first thing he notices when he stirs the next morning is the smell of Rebecca’s shampoo, and his stomach somersaults unbidden inside of him.

It comes back to him in pieces—how vividly he’d dreamt of her, of the way she’d shown up at his door and he’d wanted to pinch himself to check he was awake. The way she’d taken what she wanted and left again, left him standing alone in his apartment where every time he thinks he almost has her, she slips through his fingers like sand.

_We’re done. I mean it. We’re over._

Well fine. He’s done with her, too. Done with every stupid, weak thing she’s ever made him feel.

The room is stuffy and stale, a far cry from the usually impeccable temperature control of his apartment and his hair feels hot and too thick where it clings to his neck. When he rolls over to get away from the offending pillow to no avail— _is it soaked in her pheromones, or something? She didn’t even spend the night_ —he groans and cracks a sleepy eyelid.

It takes him a second to take stock of his surroundings. For all their salacious history, he’s only ever spent one night in Rebecca’s bed before, and it was for the most part comprised of him spooning an oversized alligator, snivelling into her bedspread. The sheets are definitely not his own, though, and the reason he’s so maddeningly enveloped by her scent becomes suddenly apparent—the decor is a little different than it was a year ago but he recognises the windows, the chest of drawers, the slew of stuffed animals strewn across the room.

He has precisely zero recollections of coming here, and an exploratory pat confirms Rebecca’s absence from beside him on the mattress. The last thing he remembers is sliding back into his bed, skin still scalding from an intentionally too-hot shower, struggling to get to sleep as he played the night over and over in his mind. Did he get drunk and follow her home? He does feel a little groggy, and what could be the beginnings of a hangover, but nothing that suggests to him black-out drunk. His chest aches like there’s pressure being applied where it shouldn't be and he shifts in an effort to ease it but somehow only serves to make it worse—when he presses up onto his elbows with a grunt, confused by the strange pull of gravity that accompanies it, the distribution of weight feels all wrong.

“What the hell is going on?” he grumbles, pulling himself upright, only half-registering the way the words sound completely off-pitch. “Rebecca?”

He needs to urinate, urgently, and that realisation shifting into focus quickly calls for a very particular brand of panic.

His hands take frantic stock beneath the covers, bumping against an unfamiliar curvature to his stomach and flinching when they encounter soft, shaven skin below the cut of satin shorts. It has a run-on effect; he registers with a lurch how his limbs feel less long, the way his toes aren’t extending anywhere close to the end of the bed. A horrified grope makes sense of his earlier source of discomfort when his tiny, ineffectual hands reach up to cup the new, inconvenient swell of his chest. 

Purple. His fingernails—not that they’re _his_ fingernails, the length of the fingers is all wrong—are fucking purple.

He channels all of the shaky adrenaline coursing through his misshapen body into flinging back the covers with way more force than is remotely required as he pads— _pads!_ —his way over to Rebecca’s vanity.

It’s a dream, obviously. It’s the only logical explanation for what he sees in front of him in the mirror. He’s dreaming or delirious or _something,_ because he definitely isn’t what his hands and his reflection in the glass are saying he is—isn’t _Rebecca_ , hair tousled and oversized t-shirt barely skimming the tops of her thighs.

He drags his palms down over his eyeballs, scrubbing them into fists, and forces himself to take a deep breath.

The insistent pressure on his bladder hasn’t gotten any better, so he swallows down his steadily mounting hysteria and makes his way down the hall to where he vaguely remembers the bathroom being, steeling himself to try again in a different mirror on the off chance hers is just broken.

No such luck.

There’s an angry red mark tinged with purple blooming on his— _Rebecca’s_ —throat, and a confusing burst of heat pulses through him as he remembers being the one to put it there. He _aches_ in a place that shouldn’t even exist, muscles stiff and sore and in his bewildered state he stands in front of the toilet staring at it blankly for an embarrassing amount of time before he’s able to bring himself to turn around and lower himself gingerly onto the seat. 

Is this what madness feels like? Does he even exist at all, or is he just a concept that’s been residing in Rebecca’s head this entire time, a character called into being by one of her elaborate musical fantasies? He knows logically that this can’t be true—he has thoughts and memories and, despite all efforts to the contrary, emotions—but by that same token he also knows logically _he can’t be in Rebecca’s body._ His brain short circuits and he loses track of how long he sits there, stupefied, staring at the top of someone else’s head in the mirror. 

Heather’s at the breakfast table idly flicking through a magazine when he finally makes it out of the bathroom, still not entirely in command of his—or Rebecca’s—faculties.

“Hey, does something about me seem off, to you?” he asks.

Heather stares at him and for a moment it floods him with relief—he’s still himself, evidenced by Heather’s confusion at his presence—until she reaches out and hits the home button on her phone to check the time. “Well, you’re up before eight-thirty on a Sunday, so. That’s a little weird, I guess.” She squints at him. “Huh. You do look kinda pale. Did you eat raw cookie dough again? Also, hold up—is that a _hickey?_ ” Her face shifts into what he assumes must be Heather’s version of excited. “Girl, did you finally get some last night? V is going to be _so_ relieved.”

He tries his best not to be withering. “Have you seen my keys?”

“Where are you going at 8am on a Sunday without pants? Or a bra, for that matter,” Heather asks in lieu of a helpful response, unconcerned with his urgent search of the countertop. “Not that there’s a problem with that—viva la revolution, or whatever—but you tend to, like, keep your giant melons all—” She indicates her own chest with a circular motion. “—strapped in. Because they could probably take someone’s eye out. Just like, generally restrained.”

He finally spots Rebecca’s keys nestled beside a penholder on the side table and snatches them up, triumphant. “Don’t care.”

“You’re right. Who needs pants or undergarments when there’s hickeys to be had, huh.”

Halfway to the entranceway he doubles back for a pair of sneakers he spots next to the couch then hesitates, wondering if he should take the gamble lest they turn out to be Heather’s. It occurs to him a second later that Rebecca probably wouldn’t care either way, but he breathes a sigh of relief that they seem to fit well enough when he slides them on, regrettably sockless, and tightens up the laces.

“Well, good talk,” he hears Heather say as he rushes out the door.

* * *

She’s still in bed when he lets himself in, sheets pooled around her waist and arms stretched out in front of her, except it’s _him,_ and that’s jarring, only he can tell immediately that it’s Rebecca, regardless of the fact that’s the most logical deduction, and _that’s_ jarring but also oddly comforting at the same time.

“I’m dissociating,” she says, staring down at her open palms. “That’s gotta be it, right? I’m having a dissociative episode.” She pinches herself, hard, on the back of her hand. “Snap out of it. Stop it. Snap out of it, right now.”

He shuts the door behind him. “Rebecca.”

“Oh god, and I thought I was doing so well. I mean, last night—that was a bit of a backslide, obviously, and it was only the other week that I was afraid to leave my house but I was past that, I really was. But apparently this is it. This is how I finally lose it.”

“ _Rebecca_.”

“I’m actually crazy,” she says, eyes widening. “I’m crazy. I’m crazy.”

He claps his hands together, the sound echoing loudly through the apartment. “Hey! Rebecca!”

“I— _aaaah_ ,” she yelps, jerking backwards on the bed when she notices him. “What are you doing here? And why are you old, now?”

That throws him for a loop. “What?”

“Oh what, my last breakdown wasn’t entertaining enough for you?” She scrambles off the bed and stalks towards him, hands fisting in the front of his shirt with an aggression that quickly fades into confusion as she stares down at where her fingers are scrunched in the fabric. “Wait… you’re really here?” she asks, releasing him, her pure bafflement etched into every aspect of Nathaniel’s face. “And you’re me?” She stops and looks down at herself before dragging her gaze back up to the figure in front of her, squinting and flailing a pointer finger disbelievingly in its direction. “ _Nathaniel?”_

He throws up his arms in a scathing suggestion of _no shit._

“Noooo. No no no no. This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. And this definitely can’t be happening with you.”

Despite the circumstances, he manages to muster up some indignation. “You think I want to be stuck with… this?” he shoots back, incredulous. “I work hard for my body, thank you very much, so I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea of it just being passed off to somebody else.”

“Oh yeah? Do you even know how many donuts go into making me look that good?”

“I think I could hazard a guess.”

He knows his barbs fall mostly flat when it hasn’t even been eight hours since he had his hands on her, here in this very room. The tiniest thread of chagrin starts to weave its way through him as they bicker, but he realises it’s strangely grounding, snipping back and forth at each other like this. Makes him feel more like himself, and a little less like he’s losing his mind. _Prickly_ sounds a lot better than _crazy._

Rebecca brings the first two fingertips up from each hand to massage her temples, brow furrowed, hunched over in thought—something he’s seen her do countless times since they started sharing an office but foreign inside the context of his awkward height and too-long fingers. 

He steadies himself with a deep breath. “We have to do something. Or tell someone. Or—”

“ _Tell_ someone? Are you out of your mind?” she exclaims, tone bordering on hysterical. “I realise we are both, in fact, essentially out of our minds right now. Or bodies, as it were. But need I remind you of my _highly_ damning history with mental health? There’s no way that ends well for either of us. Uh-uh. That’s, like, cart me off to the psych ward and throw away the key crazy.”

For the first time since he arrived he hits pause on his own panic long enough to entertain some sympathy for hers. There’s already a frantic voice whispering _you’re insane_ on repeat like a broken record player in his mind, and he’s not the one between them with a personality disorder.

“Hey,” he says, and reaches out to grab her without thinking. “Calm down.”

A tiny thrill runs through him at the contact, and from the way she snatches back her hand, he’s pretty sure Rebecca feels it too.

“Okay,” she says. “You’re right. Calm thoughts. SASSY. Think SASSY.”

“Sassy?”

“Shut up! I’m trying to soothe myself.”

Watching Rebecca fold his body in on itself as she practically vibrates with anxiety makes him feel for a moment like he needs to be his father, to scold her to stand up straighter and stop scratching her elbow like that, to stop looking so weak. The impulse is immediately undercut by a nauseating wave of self-loathing, though, flooding hot through his bloodstream and curdling somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach. As upsetting as this whole situation is for him, he can only imagine how much worse it must be for Rebecca, who already has so many reasons not to want to trust her own mind.

She makes a sudden beeline to the bathroom, and when she doesn’t shut the door he trails cautiously after her. He isn’t expecting how much of a strange relief it is to see his body in front of him in the mirror, in an iteration he’s entirely used to instead of so disconcertingly apart from himself. While Rebecca pokes and prods at her newly discovered abs he makes himself focus on the reflection, and the world looks a little less off-kilter.

“Wow, so broody,” she says, mock-frowning and pressing a finger to the centre of his brow, turning to examine it in profile. She pinches at his stomach, marvelling at the way she’s barely able to gather any skin between her fingers. “You know, I’ve always kind of wondered what it would be like to be tall and skinny and toned for a day, but in that fantasy I usually just swap bodies with Heather or, like, a Victoria’s Secret model.”

“When you’re done admiring me,” he says over her shoulder, exasperated.

“In your dreams.”

The sound of the words coming out in his voice triggers something inside her, sending her back to the night before with the heat of him everywhere and his mouth beside her ear— _I was dreaming of you, before you came here_ , and the memory of it ghosts through her with a shudder.

The resulting realisation slams into her at an approximately forty miles per hour windspeed.

“Where is he?” she growls, stalking out of the bathroom and heading menacingly towards the window. “I’ll kill him.”

“Who?”

Nathaniel’s not ready for the venom coating the sound of his own voice when she spits out, “The wind. _Obviously._ God, it’s like he ships us, or something, and he just won’t let it go.” She sticks her head out through the open pane. “Move on, dude!”

“Could you maybe not embarrass me in front of my neighbours, hmm?” he asks, yanking her back inside and frowning at how ineffectual he finds himself against his own height. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s the winds,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “The devil winds. They didn’t ruin my life enough the first time, so they’re back to fuck with me some more.”

“Okay, Karen,” he scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Look, there has to be some kind of logical, non-magical, non-weather related explanation for this. This isn’t a thing that just happens. It isn’t possible.”

“If ghosts are possible, I guess body swapping is possible too.”

“If ghosts were possible—which they’re _not_.”

“Yes, they are,” she says solemnly. “There was one in my house up until very recently.”

There’s not really anything he can think of to say in response to that, so he settles for tilting his head at her. He’s having a hard enough time wrapping his mind around his current situation. He doesn’t need to complicate things further by asking Rebecca about ghosts.

She’s adamant, though. “Look, I’m telling you I know what happened, okay? We had that fight, and then that Frankie Valli wannabe Freaky Friday’d us.”

He frowns. “Today’s Sunday.”

“No, Freaky Fri—the movie, Freaky Friday? You know—the seminal classic starring Lindsay Lohan. Are you kidding me right now? You’ve never seen Freaky Friday?”

“ _That’s_ what you’re going to zero in on this present moment?”

If he’s being completely honest, he’s having a tough time focusing on anything. He keeps getting distracted by parts of him moving in ways he's not used to, by the knee-jerk palpitation every time he looks somewhere else other than Rebecca then back to her, like he has to readjust to his ongoing out of body experience all over again.

“Okay,” he says, indulging her, hands raised in an attempt at appeasement. “Suppose it is the wind. Or… Freaky Friday. Or Spooky Sunday, or whatever you think this is. What happens next? Theoretically. How do we switch back?”

She crosses her arms, haughty and petulant, as if she’s unconvinced he’s deserving of the explanation. After a moment she relents, though, shaking her shoulders as if trying to flick back her no-longer-existent hair. “Well, in the movie the whole thing’s because of enchanted fortune cookies that contain some kind of mystical body-swapping spell, and they only change back after they’ve walked a mile in each other’s shoes, so to speak, and demonstrated their newfound understanding through an act of selfless love.” She clears her throat, avoiding his eyes. “But that’s just some stupid movie, so in our case I’m just gonna go with what happened last time and say that we wait it out, and when the winds are done with us, everything will go back to normal.”

“Last time?” he echoes.

“Uh, _yeah_ ,” she says, slowly, like he’s the stupidest person she’s ever met. “You, me; strange dreams, stuck in an elevator, inappropriate kissing? Ring any bells? None of that was actually us—you get that, right? It was the winds, making us crazy. The same kind of crazy we’re stuck in now. We just have to… ride it out.”

“So essentially your solution is do nothing,” he says. “Terrific. Super proactive.”

Not that he has any better ideas.

* * *

“Dude, what’s with all the plaid?” she calls out to him, voice muffled through the cupboard door. “You and Heather should compare patterns sometime.”

She’d relegated him to the kitchen while she combed through his closet and changed despite the absurdity of it being his body, a body she’d been pressed up against sans clothing only the evening before at that. He’d acquiesced despite the eye roll and when she lets him back in he can’t stop himself from pulling a face at the blue checked shirt she’s chosen to wear unbuttoned over a v-necked tee. 

“That’s not how you wear shirts.”

“It’s how I wear shirts,” she retorts. “And like you can talk, Mr-I-couldn’t-even-put-on-pants-to-drive-over-here.”

It’s laughably self-conscious, the way he tugs her nightshirt down over his thighs. “Forgive me for being a little preoccupied when I woke up this morning,” he snaps defensively.

The tension between them is still thick from the night before, even pushed as it is to the background in the light of more pressing developments. It doesn’t stop it rising up hot and bitter in his throat when she snips at him, and he’s not sure if it’s his influence or hers that’s kept his skin pin-pricking with agitation at their imposed proximity since he got here.

“Alright. Let’s go,” Rebecca announces once she’s done pulling on his shoes. “I need to check my phone and just—” Her eyes sweep around the room, and she swallows when they hit the bed. “—not be in this apartment anymore.”

“What? Why do I have to come?”

It makes sense that she wants to go home—after all, that had been his first instinct, too—but he’d also assumed he would stay put.

“Because,” she says, impatient, shaking her keys at him. “I look like you. And I have housemates. I can’t just go waltzing into my house, looking like this.”

“I agree,” he can’t stop himself from saying. “You really should button the shirt first.”

He ducks just in time to dodge the pillow she sends sailing across the room towards his head.

* * *

Heather’s migrated to the living room when they get back to Rebecca’s house, sprawled out on the couch with Hector watching Sunday cartoons. His hair is wet and ruffled, and Nathaniel surmises from the faint smell of salt in the air that he’s been out surfing.

“Morning, Rebecca,” Hector greets cheerfully. “Hey, man.”

It takes Nathaniel a second too long to process the appropriate part of the sentence he’s supposed to respond to. “Good morning,” he eventually manages, tone unintentionally stiff.

Heather cranes her neck to peer up over the back of the couch at them, curiosity piqued by Hector’s double greeting. “Gross. What’s Patrick Bateman doing here?” Her eyes and mouth start turning into scandalised little ‘o’ shapes as she evidently makes the connection to certain incriminating evidence she recalls spying on on Rebecca’s skin earlier. “Is _that_ who g—”

“He’s—I mean _I’m_ —dropping off some paperwork. For work,” Rebecca cuts in. “On… papers.”

“Uh-huh,” Heather says, unconvinced, glancing between them. “That you’re definitely holding and are in no way invisible. Sure.”

Nathaniel gets that it’s probably his turn to say something, he does, but he’s having a hard enough time stringing words together to keep up with Rebecca, let alone throwing other people into the mix.

“Babe,” Hector says. “We’re living in the modern age. You can do paperwork on your phone now. Isn’t that right, guys?”

“Right,” Nathaniel quickly agrees, pointing at him. “She—I mean _he_ , because he is definitely a he—has all the papers on his phone.”

Eyes fluttering shut in an irritated cringe at their complete failure to be remotely convincing, Rebecca growls and fists her hand in the fabric of his shirt and starts yanking him in the direction of her bedroom before he can say anything else. By the time she’s shoved him inside and slammed the door her phone is already buzzing on the nightstand.

_hey so the american psycho thing was a joke but real talk are u being murdered right now? do i need to get my axe? msg me back or i’m coming in._

It occurs to them far too late that Rebecca aggressively dragging herself through the house in the shape of a 6’2” man probably wasn’t the best idea, and they realise in hindsight approximately how concerning that might have looked to her housemates.

“Well, that’s just great. Now I need to convince Heather not to bust the door open to rescue me from myself.”

_Parts of me are,_ she types back after some consideration, with a smirking emoji at the end for good measure.

“Gross,” Heather announces from the other room. 

_sorry i asked. davis out._

Rebecca tosses her phone onto the bed and claps her hands together, prayer-like. “So those guys think we’re banging. Which gives us two hours, maybe three before there’s any danger of them coming back.”

He protests when she grabs the hem of his nightshirt and starts pulling it up over his head. “Oh, so I had to hide in the kitchen but you get a hands on experience? How does that work?”

She disappears over the side of the bed, reaching down to collect the bra she’d thrown there carelessly the day before. “Because there’s no way I’m missing you trying to put on _that_ ,” she says, shoving it against his chest.

“Please,” he scoffs, inspecting the black nylon. “Like it could be that hard.”

He never thought he’d have such a strong urge to punch his own face.

* * *

Six minutes.

That’s how long she lets him pace the width of the room, contort his body and roll around on the bed with his arms twisted behind his back trying to get the clasp to stay hooked before she crosses her arms and coolly asks if he’s done. He’s not one to give in, though, so she ends up having to slap his hands away to commandeer the band, which she definitely pulls back just far enough to hurt when it snaps into place, snug against his skin. 

“How’s that patriarchy treating you, huh?” she asks, flicking one of the straps as well for good measure.

“Ow. Stop it.” 

She leaves him rubbing at his shoulder as he pulls on the shirt and jeans she left out for him in favour of starfishing across her bed, taking full advantage of the extra length to her limbs in executing her full-mattress sprawl.

“So I’m gunning for just a twenty four hour thing,” she says. “We go back to sleep in each other’s beds, the wind man’s had his fun and we switch back in the night and we wake up and it was all a dream. Joke’s on us, hijinks were had, everything goes back to normal and we go on with our firmly no-longer-intertwined lives.” She shakes her head. “I mean, except for work. We go on with our strictly-professionally-intertwined lives.”

It takes him by surprise, the pathetic ache that spreads through him at the casualness of her words. At the reminder of how good she can be at separating herself from feelings when she wants to, at the same way she’d burst into his office not quite a year ago, bubbly and brazen in her request to return as if she hadn’t recently reached deep inside his ribcage and ripped out his bewildered heart.

He’s always been a poor match for her flippancy.

_I don’t know how to be around you right now,_ he wants to say to her, _in your body and after last night. It’s too many things to not be able to make sense of at once._

“I’m going to go for a run,” he says instead, and ignores every one of her protests as he heads for her front door.

* * *

When Rebecca Bunch’s body runs—read: _attempts to approximate running_ —her lungs turn into a hot white vacuum, burning like they’re about to burst, and her skin blossoms with an unattractive level of blotchiness that has Nathaniel rolling his eyes in the mirror as he sponges himself off with a washcloth. He had decided against pushing through the pain before he went into cardiac arrest— _what happens if you die in someone else’s body, anyway?_ —irritated to admit he was equally impeded by her cup size as her fitness levels or lack thereof. Breasts, as it turns out, are not as fun in practice as they are in theory.

The wet cloth is cool against the mottled flush of his skin, and as he swipes it down over his face and neck, heartbeat finally slowing, he finds himself strangely calm and contemplative.

He’s spent a lot of time with Rebecca’s body over the past year, and he would like to think he knows it reasonably well. Having someone’s body semi-permanently sandwiched between yours and a photocopier is a lot different to physically inhabiting it, though, and he still can’t wrap his mind around it.

He’d never really been with someone like Rebecca before—on so many levels—but his initial confusion at the attraction had begun with her body. The girls he kept for company tended to be of a certain, predictable variety; leggy, lithe, with distinguishable hipbones and a height a little more proportionate to his own. Rebecca was somebody’s type, probably, but she wasn’t his, so the prickly-skin sensation effervescing into being at some point after he found himself flat on his back with her straddling him in the conference room and solidifying into something much more tangible in the low light of an elevator had caught him off-guard. Then she’d kissed him like she was catching fire, and he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head—not exactly a problem he’d ever expected to to have to deal with in the literal sense.

By the time she’d let him hold her at the masquerade, he couldn’t remember ever having wanted anything more. At some point it had stopped occurring to him to be disgusted.

So it’s conflicting, the way he’s grown to love to nuzzle against the pouch of her stomach on his journey down towards her thighs but the shape of it in his hands now has his fingers itching to go for the calipers, caught up as they are in the memory of every scathing remark his father ever imparted to him after water polo practice, of the urge to fine-tune and run his mass like a machine. Where he’s used to being composed of clean cuts of lean muscle Rebecca’s body is all curves and compress, gentle pliant swells and expanses of creamy skin. Nothing about it feels _normal_ , and it has him itching to reach for every restart button he knows.

The most jarring part by far has been the height difference, though—the way everything feels like he’s sat too close to the front row at the cinema, neck craned constantly upwards to account for the acuteness of the angle.

Her hair’s so much longer than when they first met; darker, too. She’s let it lighten somewhat since she first went all _Basic Instinct_ on them in the boardroom and he likes the middle ground—likes the way she wears it a little looser, mostly down but pulled back from her face, all the better to show the way it brings out the colour of her eyes. He still hasn’t gotten used to the way it brushes over his bare shoulders, oddly electric, evocative as it is of mornings spent with her sprawled out across his chest, her sex-tousled tresses adorably tangled and unkempt.

Washcloth discarded, he traces the width of his collarbone and follows the dip between his breasts. Pinches at where the tissue extends out towards his underarm, and rubs over the tiny mole there that he’s pressed a kiss to more than once. Drops his palms down to squeeze at the padding of his hips he’s sunk his hands into so many times there should be indents in the flesh from his fingers. Three short weeks he’d had to document every inch of her in detail, and eight months in secret spent revising her in Braille. In a weird way, he muses, Rebecca’s body should feel like a second home to him, for all the time he’s already spent inside of it.

There’s an awful sort of bruised feeling that makes him wince when he breathes, and after poking and prodding himself gingerly one last time he switches off the bathroom light and makes his way back down the hall towards her bedroom.

She was gone, when he got back—phone missing, and his left in its place—and that stung something like a bruise, too.

_How does anyone do anything with boobs, anyway?_ he texts her begrudgingly after a short-lived hesitation, his stomach clenching at the immediate appearance of the ellipses signifying her reading and response. 

_With great difficulty, it’s true._

Then—

_Top drawer on the left. Hot pink spandex, can’t miss it. It’s your colour and everything._

He follows her instructions and finds the sports bra that’s been folded and pushed up far towards the back. A peace offering of sorts.

Not that he’s going to need it, he thinks as he slides back into her unmade bed. 

_Twenty four hours. We wake up and it was all a dream._


	3. what's a body but a toy?

She doesn’t sleep at all.

Insomnia is almost like an old friend to her at this point, albeit one she really wishes would stop dropping by unannounced. Not that it’s completely unexpected in this case—it makes sense she’d have a lot on her mind, given it’s the only familiar part of her she currently has access to.

She doesn’t want to wear his clothes because they feel all wrong and remind her of him, but being naked and confronted with just how much of her isn’t _her_ is just as unsettling. She’s had enough issues with body dysmorphia over the years without inheriting someone else’s; not that there’s anything _wrong_ with Nathaniel’s body, aside from how it fits her, the way she’s swimming in it, all lankiness and limbs. All his shirts remind her of something—be it ripping them off him in the supply closet or lounging in them, bare-thighed across his lap—and she digs through his closet for the least Nathaniel thing she can find, which turns out to be a threadbare and faded Bon Jovi band tee with scraps of fabric that barely constitute sleeves she’ll have to remember to tease him about later.

Sleeping in his bed is very high on her list of things she’d rather not be doing the night immediately after they had hot, sweaty sex in it then broke up, but she has to give up on her relocation to the couch when she realises she won’t fit across the length of it. She rips all the sheets off it, though, and in lieu of finding new ones spreads out the soft grey throw from the back of the sofa over the mattress instead. It’s only after she sprawls out across it—one muscled arm pillowed beneath her head and the other resting on the newfound flat of her stomach—that renewed panic at her situation seeps back in.

She _wants_ to talk to someone about it—to Paula, the girls, Dr Akopian, her group—and that urge alone is a testament to how far she’s come, not just in therapy but in friendship, and surrounding herself with people she trusts. The problem is the only option she has right now is Nathaniel, and while when it comes to their current situation it’s inevitable that he _gets it—_ he is, after all, in exactly the same predicament—she still throbs with frustration at all the other things he’s so recently failed to _get_. Nathaniel is just about the last person she wants to be seeing or thinking or feeling things about right now, which is difficult given the way half his body is permanently folded into her field of vision and she can’t pass a reflective surface without catching a glimpse of his annoyingly symmetrical face.

The anxiety she’s done a reasonably good job of dealing with lately flares up inside her, the flame of her mental panic fanning out into an uncontrolled burn until she’s stuck staring at the too-high ceiling of Nathaniel’s apartment—terrified to move lest she serve herself a reminder of just how much she isn’t herself right now—caught in a ceaseless cycle of looping thoughts.

So when her 6am alarm goes off and she’s still very much inside Nathaniel’s body, a tiny voice inside her sleep deprived brain can’t help but tell her it’s all her fault. That if she’d just fallen asleep the way she was supposed to, they would’ve switched back by now; that this, like most things, is somehow a mess of her own making, and that she’s managed to ruin everything just by being her (albeit inside of someone else).

She showers on autopilot, thankful at least she has enough prior knowledge of Nathaniel’s bathroom to understand how the confusing arrangements of his taps work, and by the time she emerges from the bathroom after stopping herself from wrapping an unnecessary towel around her hair, her phone is vibrating on the nightstand.

“Hello?” she rasps.

“Hi.”

It’s her own unimpressed voice greeting her from the other end of the line, and as much as she really doesn’t want to deal with Nathaniel right now, she knows she can’t exactly avoid him, either. “Hi.”

Neither of them speak for an awkward stretch of seconds, both keenly aware of what the call is regarding but seeing no sense in saying it out loud: it wasn’t a dream or a hallucination or a twenty four hour bug—the winds are still howling outside and they’re still very much stuck in each other’s skin.

After a moment, Rebecca clears her throat. “So we should get ready for work, I guess.”

“Work?” Nathaniel splutters. “We can’t go to work!”

She drags her free hand down over her face, smooshing all her features in an unsuccessful attempt to quell her rising frustration. “Nathaniel, we have to go into work. It’s my first day back, and if I don’t show up—”

“You don’t think that’s asking for trouble, given our current situation?”

“Not really? We literally work in the same office, performing the same duties. This is the one part of this whole ideal that should be a complete walk in the park for us. Plus, my letter from the bar association absolving me of all my crimes hasn’t come yet, so technically I—therefore you—can’t even practice right now. C’mon, this will be a breeze. Who do you think is going to figure it out? Tim?” She scoffs. “Please. If anyone’s going to notice something is up, it’s going to be Paula, and lucky for you erratic behaviour isn’t exactly out of left field for me. Not to mention I was recently released from jail.”

“Fine,” he says.

She hesitates, tone stiffening around the words she’s had a solid twelve hours to contemplate, in amongst everything else. “Also, I was thinking about it, and it’s probably easiest if for now we just… let people think we’re back together.”

There’s a stony pause on the other end before he asks, “What?”

“If we’re going to pretend to be each other, it’s going to require a lot of face time, and I just think it’ll save us some questions. It’s pretty much a blanket excuse to be all up in each other’s business.”

He huffs out a bitter, disbelieving laugh. “Forgive me if I’m not exactly feeling particularly amicable towards you right now, Rebecca.”

The chill in his tone, even as filtered through her vocal cords, is unmistakable. She’s already prickly in her exhaustion and the anger is a lot easier to latch onto than the unwelcome accompanying stab of guilt. She resents the implication that he’s the only one with the right to feel put-out in all of this, the way he’s so good at finding the wrong take-away in every complicated twist and turn their relationship has taken.

“Oh what, you think I want this?” she snaps at him. “You think I _want_ my friends to think I’m stupid and weak for going back to you _again_ after supposedly setting up boundaries and stepping away? Get ready for the condescending pat on the head, since it’s all yours now. Poor little Rebecca—she’s trying, but she sure stumbles a lot.”

“Pardon?” he asks, scrunching up his face.

“Yeah,” she says, almost breathless with annoyance, tucking the phone against her shoulder as she yanks up her pants. “Basically everyone I know thinks you’re a giant asshole, so have fun coming to terms with _that_ while you look like me.” She makes a move to hang up then reconsiders to yell into the receiver, “Wear a bra!”

She disconnects the call and tosses her phone on the bed, furious, then forces herself to take a deep breath, trying to decide the best way to take this pervasive irritability and channel it into something that vaguely resembles Nathaniel.

* * *

He’s still bristling over their prematurely terminated phone call as he chops at the only remotely edible items he managed to forage from Rebecca’s fridge. A quick survey of the cupboards came up short on a blender, so he settles for shovelling sticks of raw carrot into his mouth with mounting agitation—the previous day’s aches have stiffened and migrated elsewhere in Rebecca’s body’s apparent disdain for the workout he’d subjected it to, only adding to his bad mood, and he’s secretly hoping that force-feeding it some nutrients might ease some of the protesting pain into submission.

“Whaaat are you wearing?” Heather drawls when she joins him in the kitchen, depositing her empty cereal bowl in the sink with a clank before turning around to gape at him.

“Clothes,” he says defensively. “Female clothes that a human female would definitely wear, because I found them in my human female closet.”

“Right. Because that’s a totally convincing and normal thing to say.” She squints at him. “Are you eating carrots and celery? Without slathering them in peanut butter first? What’s happening? Is this Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, or something? Is that what this is? Am I talking to a pod person?”

He hammers the lid onto a Tupperware container with finality, shooting Heather a glare. He’s already running late, thanks to his ongoing inability to comprehend how female undergarments work—not that a complete disregard for punctuality could be deemed unusual, given who he’s currently masquerading as—and Heather’s critique of what he believes to be an impeccable interpretation of Rebecca’s sense of style immediately rubs him the wrong way.

“Listen, I don’t really have time for this conversation right now,” he says, gathering his, or rather Rebecca’s, belongings and heading for the front door.

Heather tilts her head to the side. “Oh. Okay. Well, there’s the housemate I know and love, I guess. Enjoy your first day back at work after getting out of jail,” she calls after him.

Paula’s reaction doesn’t turn out to be any more encouraging.

He has to stop himself from barrelling straight towards his office, head pointedly down in an attempt to ward off conversation. It’s Rebecca’s first day back, which means people are going to make a fuss, and while he’s not exactly planning on playing along he knows he can’t just lock himself away from it, either.

Paula’s enthusiastic jazz hands are as good a reason as any to pull himself to a halt, cringing internally but forcing himself to return her excited smile. The redhead’s expression only makes it through two seconds of staring at him, however, before it rearranges itself into something a little more narrow-eyed.

She gives him a blatant once over and a short, sharp shake of her head. “Oh-kay. Not even sure where to start with… all this, so I’m just going to stick to good morning—and welcome back, honey!” 

“Paula,” he says, politely, jutting out his chin and trying not to shrivel as she envelopes him in a tight squeeze.

“Nice quiff,” she adds, drawing back, after a pause ripe with mounting confusion as she studies the lack of makeup and the twist in the top of his hair. “What’s that, like from one of those YouTube tutorials, or something?”

He frowns absently, still scanning the bullpen for signs of Rebecca. “Sure.”

“Well whatever it is, I’m digging it. So 80s rock chic. And the outfit, well—that is… really something.” Paula pulls herself up out of her cubicle, coming around to join him as his eyes track towards his office. “Yeah… so part of Nathaniel’s whole temper tantrum after the hearing involved him having George and Maya move his stuff back since, and I quote—‘it’s not like you were going to be needing it anymore’. Your things were probably headed for the downstairs dumpster at that point, but I told Maya to move you in with Darryl for the time being. You are welcome.”

Twin cool blue flames of betrayal and embarrassment flicker up inside of Nathaniel, and he has to force himself to bite back the retorts that start to take shape on the tip of his tongue. He’s not proud of his behaviour after hearing her plea, but the recent renewed sting of Rebecca’s rejection still simmers inside him, the urge to bear grudge not an easy one to let go.

“I mean, Darryl’s still on paternity leave, anyway, so you’ll have some time to yourself and it’ll be nice, being back in your old office, right? It’s almost like bringing it all full circle—first you taking back the firm from Nathaniel, and now you can reclaim the office he kicked you out of to begin with.”

Paula’s not even being particularly scathing—there’s nothing she’s said that isn’t true—but he can’t help but think back to Rebecca’s parting remarks from their phone call earlier, and his mouth flattens into a grim line. 

“Perfect,” he says, nodding. “I’ll get myself settled in.”

He ignores the look of surprise on her face when he shuts the door somewhat firmly behind him.

* * *

Nathaniel’s body, she quickly comes to learn, doesn’t quite know how to operate on over twenty four hours without sleep.

She knows from their brief time together that he’s a light sleeper but a regular one—his sleep cycle, much like his entire life, fine tuned to fit a super-efficient schedule. He prides himself on taking care of his body, and part of that takes the form of ensuring it’s relatively well rested; though she’d managed to persuade him otherwise on more than one occasion, he generally went to before bed at ten and rose from it before six with little exception. So between the unplanned interruption to his slumber the night before and her own sleepless night, his system is very much starting to scream its protest, and six cups of coffee hasn’t made much of a difference.

“Damn it, Tim—I said the donuts with the pink sprinkles, not the edible pearls. Everybody knows the cachous hurt my molars,” she says, tapping on her front teeth to punctuate. “Can’t you do anything right?”

Tim’s standing to her left, pink confectionary box still cradled in his hands in confusion. 

“I’ll scrape them off. It’s fine. Give me that,” she sighs.

It’s undeniably petty, the way Tim sidling into her office first thing in the morning to kiss ass had sparked inside her the impulse to push the limits of their credibility. But it’s early, she’s cranky, and circumstances are absurd—she figures she deserves this, the pick-me-up literal and metaphorical, a donut sugar rush for the soul. 

“What is happening right now?” Tim asks, voice drawn-out and dazed.

Rebecca ignores him, continuing to stuff the entirety of the donut into her mouth and making sure to smear some of the icing across her face in the process. She gets her comeuppance a fraction of a second later when she nearly chokes, eyes bulging as she spots Nathaniel, the less-than-subtle sight of her red pushup unmistakable, even from twenty five feet and behind glass. The scarlet lace is like a neon sign, practically beckoning the gaze of anyone in a two mile radius to gape at her chest where it flashes through the low-cut neckline of the sheer shirt he’s chosen.

Tim barely has time to wrap his fingers around the donut box she shoves back at him before she’s swinging her legs down off the desk to stomp across to where Nathaniel is standing by the photocopier.

“Dude,” she hisses, widening her eyes at him. “What the fuck are you wearing?”

“What am _I_ wearing? What are _you_ wearing?”

She scrunches up her face. “What do you mean, what am _I_ wearing? I nailed this. You wear the same thing every day.”

“That shirt with that suit? Please,” he scoffs. “The tonings are all wrong—”

“Well at least my _tonings_ aren’t hanging out for the entire office to see.”

“—and you’re not even wearing a tie.”

“Yeah, okay, so maybe I couldn’t get the knot right,” she admits, tone entirely petulant, and Nathaniel hums at her in satisfaction. “But I at least brought one in my bag for you to put on me later. I’m gonna bet you didn’t stuff an extra shirt inside your purse.”

They’re interrupted by a low, appreciative whistle.

“Hey Rebecca—nice blouse. You wear that just for me?” Jim asks with a wink, and Nathaniel at least has the decency to look scandalised on her behalf.

Rebecca’s thin patience snaps like an over-worked rubber band and she straightens, snatching the cup of coffee from George’s hands as he passes without missing a beat. She doesn’t even flinch when the heat of it spreads across her chest, soaking the grey fabric and scalding against her skin.

“Oh, oh no, look at that—I’ve spilled coffee all over myself,” she announces loudly, earning a sea of bemused looks from the bullpen. “God, I’m so clumsy and… tall. Guess I better go change.”

“Oh, so you’re _burning_ me now? That’s how you want to play it?” Nathaniel bites at her.

She doesn’t even dignify him by glancing back.

* * *

It’s mid-Monday morning, almost the middle of the day—Heather should be at Home Base, and a quick perusal of Facebook informs her Hector is surfing somewhere up the coast—so she feels secure in her decision to let herself in to her own house with the spare key they hide under the pot plant on the porch. There’s a bath bomb she got last Christmas untouched under the bathroom sink that suddenly has her name on it, and Nathaniel can’t make a fuss about her taking an early, two hour lunch if he’s not currently Nathaniel. It might be her first day back at work but that’s his problem, now; she should probably be more concerned, leaving him unsupervised, not to mention dressed as he is, but the way the suffocating feeling eased off her chest the minute she left the building tells her that for now, she’s making the right choice.

She takes her time setting the mood, lighting some candles and bringing up the _Bed, Bath and Beyond_ playlist on her Spotify, all the while guiltily trying to keep her eyes away from the red blaze still stinging across her chest in the mirror.

No wonder he’s so tense all the time, she thinks as she finally sinks into the suds, struggling to get comfortable and adequately stretch out her too-long legs along the porcelain. The idiot can’t even take a proper bath.

After some experimentation on the angle of recline she settles for a back-in, calves-out kind of arrangement, folding herself at a forty-five degree angle up from the side in order to submerge as much of her body as possible, the mottled rash of the coffee burn prickling in the heat of the water. What she definitely does _not_ do is spend any amount of time rolling her hips back and forth, taking note of the buoyancy of certain parts of her as they bob leisurely up and down in the resulting current. 

Awkward fit aside, when she closes her eyes and focuses on the soothing lavender scent of the bath bomb gently agitating the water somewhere around her hip she can almost pretend none of this is happening, that she’s back in her own body and everything is fine. Her muscles turn to mush as the exhaustion seeps out of them, liquified and loose, and her breathing steadies out to a shallow, even roll.

She’s almost asleep when she startles at the horrified shriek announcing someone else’s presence in the bathroom, her alarm sending her slipping backwards into the water, legs flinging up from the opposite end of the tub to compensate and drawing another protesting shout out of her intruder.

“Oh my god, what are you doing in my bath,” Heather says with a grimace, shielding her face and turning away.

Rebecca scrabbles for purchase on the sides of the porcelain, fingers slipping in the light purple residue. It takes her a moment to realise that her top half isn’t the part she really needs to be concerning herself with concealing, and she awkwardly hauls herself back up into a seated position. The bath bomb, while aesthetically and aromatically pleasing, affords little cover in the way of bubbles, and from the way Heather’s fingers are clamping down even harder over her eyes she thinks she may have already revealed more than she meant to.

She splutters around an accidental mouthful of soap water she managed to inhale. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at work.”

“What am _I_ doing here?” Heather repeats, her usual monotone ascending appropriately in pitch. “What are _you_ doing here? I’m here because my boyfriend needed a change of clothes to go to the ER for his manky toe but also? I _live_ here, unlike you.”

“I didn’t think anyone would be home,” Rebecca offers meekly, eyes fluttering shut in a preemptive cringe.

“What? Why do you think that makes it better? It doesn’t. It makes it worse. Using someone else’s bathtub when they’re not home and without them knowing is _worse,_ you upper-crust white-bread weirdo.”

“Rebecca said I could,” Rebecca says quickly, defensively. “She knew I was having a rough day and that I needed to—” Her gaze slides over the assortment of scented candles flickering around the edge of the tub, realising with a tiny stab of satisfaction how mortified Nathaniel would be to know she got him caught like this. “—unwind.”

“Well if you could, like, re-wind yourself and take your rough day elsewhere.”

Heather blindly pitches a bath towel at her so hard she has to scrunch herself up to deflect, half of it skimming the water as a result, before patting the walls to feel her way out.

Her incensed housemate is nowhere to be seen by the time Rebecca emerges from the bathroom, wincing at the sodden towel tied around her waist as it chafes against her skin on her dash down the hallway.

She probably should have at least tried to blot out the coffee stain she’d subjected his shirt to, she thinks regrettably as she eyes the wrinkled pile of his office attire. But then her mind shifts back to what he’d chosen for her and the indignation re-curdles in her stomach with full force; it’s not like there aren’t at least five others where that one came from, and she’s sure his bank account could handle the cost of a replacement.

She rifles through Nathaniel’s gym bag for a change of clothes, sniffing gingerly at them to check they’re clean when the speckle of ashen fabric gives her an idea.

“Two can play at that game,” she mutters as she yanks the shirt down over her head. 

* * *

“Oh, come on,” Nathaniel complains loudly when he spots her, sauntering through the reception area in his navy sweatpants and her own faded grey Harvard t-shirt, the material clinging damp across the chest.

It’s enough to draw the attention of the office, and Nathaniel bristles at the unwelcome audience while Rebecca’s expression exudes only gratification—she’s entirely too pleased with herself, the way she pulls herself up to full height and rolls back her shoulders, making sure everyone can read exactly what’s emblazoned across her front, as if that’s the most ridiculous part of her outfit.

Paula pauses in front of them where they stand, eyes locked in a tense stand-off, her own manila folders poised in mid-air. “Did you two lose a bet, or something? What is this? Do I even want to know?”

“No,” Nathaniel says, without looking at her.

“Noted. And carrying on.”

Their other colleagues fail to share Paula’s ability to mind their own business, however, and a riveted silence stretches over them until it’s broken by the jarring crunch of Tim stuffing his mouth with crisps.

“It’s Weekend Tuesday,” Rebecca says, eyes never leaving Nathaniel’s.

“Today’s Monday,” Maya chirps helpfully, pushing her glasses up her nose as she sidles closer.

Perking up, Darryl scrambles over to join them. “Weekend Tuesday’s been reinstated? Oh man, I _loved_ Weekend Tuesdays, but then when you took over the firm you said they were ‘unprofessional’ and ‘decreased productivity’. But _oh,_ I knew you’d eventually come around to—” 

“Aren’t you supposed to be on paternity leave, Darryl?” Nathaniel asks, and it becomes apparent from the looks he receives that his tone is far sharper than anybody’s used to from Rebecca, especially Darryl.

“I _am_ on paternity leave. I was bringing Hebby by for a visit. Would you like to hold her?” Darryl’s face is so disgustingly eager that Nathaniel has to actively refrain from letting his lip curl in distaste.

He hesitates, trying to summon a semblance of something Rebecca might say. “Now’s not really—”

“We’re kind of in the middle of something here, Darryl, so show and tell time with your mini me is going to have to wait,” Rebecca interjects for him, firm. “Weekends were, regrettably, invented for a reason.”

Nathaniel’s not entirely sure whether she’s trying to save him from holding the baby or herself from Darryl thinking she's interested in doing any such thing at all, but in spite of himself he’s grateful just the same.

He’s pulled back into focus by Rebecca clearing her throat, shoulders dropping a little. “Can I see you in my office, Miss Bunch?” 

The imitation is convincing enough, but coupled with the clothes and the posture the whole thing reads entirely wrong. His body as occupied by Rebecca Bunch has all the finesse of a baby giraffe; of Bambi, when that pesky rabbit has to teach him how to walk. Not that he’s convinced he’s doing any better, off-kilter as he is in the shoes he’d foolishly chosen. The heels had been an attempt at reclaiming some height, and while there was comfort in the extra inches, mobility was an entirely separate issue.

“Stop it,” he says as they finally make it into the office. 

“Stop what?”

“Stomping around like you’re wearing flippers, or something. You’re making me look like a duck.”

“Maybe you always look like a duck and you’ve just never noticed.” He raises his eyebrows at her and she rolls her eyes, relenting. “Fine. You don’t look like a duck. But I’m sorry I don’t know how to walk with an added foot.”

“One in front of the other, like always.”

She pulls a face at him, and he mentally adds it to the list of arrangements of his features he’s not particularly fond of.

He’s just about to drop into his chair when he stops himself, eyes flicking to the door through which they’re no doubt still being watched. They orient themselves on the correct sides of the desk but remain on their feet, on guard.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks once he thinks he has his emotions in check, the words still coming out with an aggressive quiver despite his lowered tone. Every emotion he experiences seems to vibrate through Rebecca’s body like an earthquake, echoing outwards tenfold to how it originates, irrespective of his intentions. “Wearing sweatpants to the office? If my father were to walk in right now he’d—”

“Oh, he’d what?” Rebecca sneers, crossing her arms over her chest. “Put me across his knee and spank me? I’d like to see him try.”

She’s being inflammatory, but the irreverent logic to her words twists through him unexpectedly. The truth is he’s not entirely sure _what_ his father would do, but Rebecca has a point—his engagement in it would be somewhat optional. 

His feathers are already ruffled, though. “I have a level of professionalism I need to maintain, Rebecca. Just because you can wear whatever you want, doesn’t mean you get to do that in my body.”

Rebecca’s answering incredulity has her eyebrows skyrocketing off the top of her forehead. “I’m sorry, did you even glance in a mirror before you left the house this morning? Because either you _didn’t notice_ that practically your entire chest is on display right now, or you noticed and you just didn’t care.”

He blows a derisive raspberry. “Oh, come on. When do you not have your chest on display?”

“I can’t help it! It’s called being busty! Anything above a D-cup and everything you wear automatically looks slutty. Doesn’t mean you can’t tone it down. Play out your twisted little fantasies on your own time.”

He takes a deep breath, crossing his arms over his chest in both a display of irritation and mounting self-consciousness, feeling his cheeks flush hot with shame. “I didn’t choose the bra because of how it looked, okay? I chose it because of how it… worked.” Her eyebrows shoot up again, requesting elaboration. “It was the only front loading model,” he says, defensively, apparently catching her off-guard with his explanation because he watches some of the anger deflate out of her in surprise.

He has to stop himself from staring, how she drags his lower lip through his teeth in a way he never would.

“Oh. That makes sense, I guess.” She fidgets, eyes downcast. “But for the record, that shirt is supposed to go over another shirt. It’s called layering, and it’s a lie sold to us by the fashion industry to propagate consumerism and oppress women multiple pieces of clothing at a time.”

“Okay,” he says, brow only slightly furrowed.

“And you can’t wear shorts like that to work.”

“You wear skirts as short as this all the time,” he argues.

“I don’t make the rules, okay? The patriarchy does, and you’re just a slave to them, so. Get used to it.”

This isn’t the first time they’ve been here, in this office, reflecting on how their reactions have been embarrassingly overblown, and if it wasn’t such an inconvenient recurring theme in their relationship it might be amusing.

He’s moved nearer to her without realising, magnetised inwards now that her hackles are no longer raised. Once he notices it he sees her shifting, too; drifting forwards as if drawn by some imaginary string, stretched out between their navels, snapping them back into place every time they think they can pull free. For a moment he feels like they should shake hands, call truce—until it occurs to him all the reasons that has previously proven to be a very bad idea, forcing him to tamp down on the muscle memory that itches in fingertips that aren’t technically his.

Rebecca shakes off the silence first, a smile twitching at her lips. “Do we need to discuss other things? Like bathroom procedure? For example, wiping for a number one is much like wiping for a number two, but you’re going to have to start a little further forw—”

“I think I’ve got it figured out, thank you,” he interrupts, grimacing.

The part of him that can’t help himself when it comes to her assumes temporary custody of her body, soothing it into submission until every remaining trace of his irritation is gone. He’s got no hope of standing his ground against her now, he realises, the way that combination is going to gang up against his pride—play him both sides against the middle.

For the first time today he stops to consider her now that she’s closer—consider himself, apart from his mismatched clothing—and sees the heavy hollows beneath her eyes, the way her skin looks sallow and pitted despite the tan. She looks exhausted, this impossible combination of his body and her battered soul, and the empty space his anger just evaporated from starts to slowly refill itself with pity.

He’s taking another half-step towards her when they both startle back from one another at the unexpected force with which Paula pushes open the office door.

“Heather’s getting _married_?” she exclaims, holding up her phone. She apparently takes note of the weird tension in the room because she winces before continuing, quieter, “Sorry. But seriously, did you know?”

Nathaniel sneaks a glance at Rebecca, and the stricken expression looking back tells him the answer is very much in the negative. He gives a tentative shake of his head.

“Friday,” Paula supplies, holding her screen at a distance to squint at the type. “Those two crazy kids are getting married on Friday. As in, four days from now Friday. Millennials, am I right? And we all thought _your_ engagement was fast.” She pauses to shimmy knowingly in Nathaniel’s direction then stops, nose wrinkling as something occurs to her. “Oh my god, is Heather pregnant?”

Rebecca’s face hasn’t shifted since the moment Paula burst into the room, so Nathaniel recognises he’s on his own until further notice. “I don’t think so?” he ventures in lieu of any guidance to the contrary.

“I mean, she did an amazing job with that one out there, don’t get me wrong,” Paula carries on, oblivious, gesturing out towards where Darryl is still passing Hebby around. “I just never got the impression she was inspired to make a start on one of her own so soon, you know what I’m saying?”

“Is that an invite?” Rebecca asks, clearing her throat and jerking out of her stupor.

“Facebook,” Paula confirms with reluctant squeeze of her fist. “So…”

“Classy?” Nathaniel offers.

“You know, I was going for hip, but sure.” She waves her hand at them and starts backing out of the door. “Anyway, I’m just gonna let you two get back to… whatever it is you’ve got going on, because it seems important, given the whole dress code, so. You and I will talk about this later.”

Paula pops out of sight almost as suddenly as she appeared, and Nathaniel’s gaze is torn from her retreat back to Rebecca at the dull thud of her collapsing dramatically into his leather chair, already scrambling for her phone.

“Five missed calls from Valencia,” she says, swiping through her notifications. “Approximately twenty texts, many of them all caps. And, yup—a Facebook invite to one of my best friends’ wedding. Oh, and apparently we’re not supposed to tell Hector.” She drops her phone down on the desk, feigning apathy. “This is fine. This is totally normal. That’s exactly how the kids are doing it these days. And Heather—she’s all progressive, and cool, so four days notice for a wedding with an unsuspecting groom isn’t weird, or impulsive, or concerning at all. It’s trendy. It’s modern. It’s what they do in Denmark. And Vegas.”

He swallows back his platitudes, knowing from experience they’ll offer her little comfort. “Rebecca,” he says instead, hoping the sentence might finish itself on autofill, but instead her name hovers hollow in the air between them, too easy for her to brush off.

She shakes her head. “We should do some work,” she says. “And I should figure out what you’re going to say when you go home tonight, because aside from some congratulations being in order, apparently, I think Heather’s going to want to have a few words with you about boundaries.”

“Home?” he echoes, raising his eyebrows. “You think I’m going back to your place tonight?”

Though they haven’t discussed otherwise, he’s kind of been planning on going back to his apartment.

Her face scrunches in confusion. “What, is that suddenly an issue for you? You stayed there last night.”

“That was when you insisted it would change us back. Which, in case you haven’t noticed, it didn’t! And I’m not indefinitely staying at your house with your angry bohemian waitress housemate and her dude bro boyfriend, okay?”

Something almost like guilt flickers across Rebecca’s face before she can school it from her features, her expression clouding and clearing in a manner of seconds. “Well that angry bohemian _regional manager_ is about to marry her dude bro boyfriend on Friday and I’m not missing it, so you’re going to get yourself—and by yourself I mean me—an invite, okay? And we can’t just stay at each other’s places,” she frowns. “That makes no sense, and people are going to ask questions.”

He rolls his eyes, Heather’s early morning interrogation of his choice of breakfast springing to mind. “People are already asking questions, because apparently you’ve never eaten a vegetable in your life.”

Rebecca looks up at him, eyes wide and mouth canted comically downward, and the combination is so ridiculous on his face that it takes him a moment to realise what she’s doing. And then the voice is back—the one that sounds suspiciously like his father—that makes him want to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she doesn’t look so pathetic.

“Stop pouting,” he says with a frown. “My eyes don’t go as wide as yours. The kicked-puppy look doesn’t translate.”

She purses her lips and swings around in the chair until her gaze zeroes in on his water polo ball where it rests on the shelf behind her, beckoning in sun-bright yellow. She snatches it up and bounces it at the wall, a little too hard and only to completely fail to catch it when it boomerangs back to her, all but smacking her flat in the chin. 

Her brow furrows into a scowl as she clutches it against her chest.

“I meant to do that,” she says to his knowing face.

* * *

He prolongs going back to Rebecca’s house for as long as humanly possible, eating dinner out and walking it off after—definitely _walking,_ because he’s still bearing the grudge of the previous day’s hard-learned lesson, nor is he in any particular hurry to referee a wrestling match between the bulk of Rebecca Bunch’s bosom and a scrap of hot pink spandex.

But when the sun disappears way down over the horizon and with it, the last vestiges of his reasons to stay away, he steels himself and makes his way back across town, rehearsing the script Rebecca gave him in his head. Best case scenario, Heather will have already retired for the evening; second place is Hector’s presence dissuading discussing anything to any particular depth. He doesn’t like his chances, though—the breakneck winds still whistling through West Covina an annoying reminder of all the ways the universe isn’t really operating in his favour right now.

There’s a light on under Heather’s door when he all but tiptoes down the hallway, and he breaths a sigh of relief when he makes it to Rebecca’s room without it swinging open to let the rest of it spill out.

It isn’t until the bra is off that he realises how much more comfortable it is without it, hating the way he can’t help but arch his back and groan in pleasure at his release from its confines. The assuage is fleeting, however, as the blood rushes angrily back into every red crease it’s carved into his skin.

He eyes her drawers with thinly veiled contempt. 

Rebecca’s room isn’t excessively untidy but it isn’t particularly neat, either; most of the disarray is entirely superficial, her drawers notably organised to a fault, but straightening her bed linen and collecting a weekend’s worth of discarded clothing from her floor is a welcome, albeit brief, distraction. Once he’s done and he thinks the coast is clear, he shrugs into her nightshirt, back still smarting from the band of her bra, and slips out to go brush his teeth.

He’s not acquainted with Rebecca’s nighttime routine outside the foggy recollection of her silhouetted in the doorway to his bathroom more than once, swiping at her face with a cotton ball to clean away the dark remnants of her make-up. He knows about the retainer, though she’d neglected it for a solid chunk of the time she’d spent sleeping at his place, not so much embarrassed by it as inconvenienced, the penchant she had for second rounds. Her hair is lengthy and requires brushing, probably—only so long he can get by on its acquaintance with his fingers.

He tenses, eyes widening in the mirror when Heather strolls into the bathroom behind him in her underwear and little else. Her thick, curly hair tickles his arm as she reaches past him for the medicine cabinet, shooting him a funny look at the obvious way he flinches.

“What’s up with you? You’re so… twitchy and weird, lately.”

“Nothing,” he insists, trying to put a stop to the obviously uncharacteristic way he’s desperate to put as much physical distance between them as possible. He clears his throat, unclenching, and tries to push his tone back towards comfortable nonchalance. “So… you and Hector, huh?”

Heather dangles her dry toothbrush out of the side of her mouth as she pats around in the cabinet for some paste, rolling her eyes. “Yeah. I’m not really into the whole big wedding thing, but Hector seemed super bummed out by my dismissal of it, so I decided to compromise and just, like, throw a big party.” She pauses, eyeing him strangely and loading up her brush.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just by now you’ve usually interrupted me with a story about yourself. I’m not really used to carrying conversations on this long. You feeling okay, roomie?”

The back of her palm makes contact with his forehead, and he has to physically grip the benchtop to counter his impulse to jerk away. 

Gladly taking his cue from the sound of her scrubbing that fills the bathroom, he turns his attention to cleaning his own teeth, reminding himself it’s not weird to use Rebecca’s brush when the mouth he’s currently stuck with is the mouth it technically belongs to.

Heather leans past him to spit in the sink. “Anyway, I’m not really having, like, bridesmaids or anything, but since you’re all smart and good with words and stuff, I thought you might want to give a speech, or whatever. You like giving speeches, right?”

Nathaniel winces as the brush slides too sharply towards the back of his mouth, almost making him gag. Optional wedding toasts weren’t mentioned anywhere in Rebecca’s otherwise startlingly thorough practice runs for all the ways in which this conversation could go, and he freezes, caught at a loss. His first instinct is to turn her down, but the likelihood that the real Rebecca would respond that way is slim; the real dilemma, he’s well aware, is which one of them he’d be signing up for the job in agreeing.

Turning the water on to rinse, Heather plonks her brush back in the cup next to the faucet and raises her eyebrows at him. “Wow. Okay, there is definitely something up with you, because I just used the word speech twice and you didn't bring up Harvard or being your high school valedictorian like, at all.”

“Sorry,” he says, executing his own spit-and-rinse manoeuvre in the sink. “Long day. And I guess I have been feeling a little out of sorts.”

Heather opens her mouth to say something in response but he’s saved by the bell—a cheerful ding-dong reverberates through the house, announcing someone’s arrival on their doorstep. “I’ll get it,” she drawls, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth and then scraping it down the side of her pants.

Nathaniel debates questioning the appropriateness of her answering the door given her current state of undress but his concerns are proven unfounded when she reappears in the hall, an oversized t-shirt hanging down to the tops of her thighs. “Someone here to see you,” she pauses in the doorway long enough to announce before disappearing towards her bedroom with an eye-roll that conveys just what she thinks of their unexpected visitor.

* * *

The minute she’d stepped inside the door to his apartment, Rebecca had blanched.

The thing was, she just really needed to _sleep_. And standing there in his entranceway—eyelids so rough and papery they felt like onion peel, with all of the accompanying sting—the panic at spending another night in his bed with nothing but a slew of bittersweet memories for company had bubbled up hot and asphyxiating in her throat. 

It’s not like she’s never had a sleepless night tangled up in her own sheets before, because she has—numerous ones, excruciating and never-ending. But she’s also never been trapped in someone else’s body, living out an entirely new kind of crazy, the skin-crawling self-doubt and uncomfortable unfamiliarity its own agonising kind of torture; a more overpowering combatant to her sense of self than any personality disorder has proven in the past.

It was better, in the daytime, with people to fool and distract and Nathaniel there, pushing every last one of her buttons. 

Nighttime there was nothing else to do but think.

“I’m not here to fight. I just… want to sleep in my bed,” she says at the way he steels himself when he sees her. She gives a helpless shrug. “I’m just really fucking tired and I want to sleep in my own bed.”

His _(her)_ eyes roam the wrung-out rings written into her _(his)_ face, and for a long moment they only stand there, drinking each other in until Nathaniel steps back, swings the door open wider, then lets her trail behind him on his way back to her bedroom. 

She makes sure to lock up behind them.

“I apologise, for today,” she says thickly, once they’re on their backs, side by side beneath the covers. “I was exhausted, and stressed, and I took that out on you. But we need to work together, if we’re going to pull this off, and not ruin each other’s lives in the process.” She takes a deep breath. “No matter how we feel about each other right now, I think we need to set those feelings aside, and focus on drawing as little attention to ourselves as possible. So… truce?”

She twists on her side to face him, and though it’s too dark to properly make out, she can feel him do the same.

“Truce,” he agrees. Then, “Heather wants you to make a speech. At the wedding.”

It’s confusing, the mix of apprehension and pride that filters through her weariness. “Well, that makes sense, I guess. I’m very good at speeches—I gave the valedictory address at my high school graduation.”

“Plus, you went to Harvard,” Nathaniel adds.

“Well that part just goes without saying.”

The mattress shifts beneath her as Nathaniel changes position, though into what she can’t be sure. When he speaks again the voice is a little further away, and she imagines him curled on his side, body echoing the curvature of hers. “I didn’t get a chance to ask about the invite,” he murmurs. “I wasn’t sure how it was going to go down, considering everyone you know thinks I’m a giant asshole.”

The pitch dark of the room doesn’t stop her—she jabs him in the stomach so hard he folds himself in half and then she’s cackling, overtired, hysterical; the pitch of it bursting forth from his body absurd. She can hear his chuff of amusement beside her as she wipes away the tears, still wheezing. “I mean, Paula tolerates you. Valencia doesn’t seem to care much about you either way. Heather mostly hates you because she thinks you broke into our house to use our bathtub.” Her ribs ache from laughing and she yawns, snuffling against the pillow. “And she thinks your hair is stupid.”

“Okay,” he scoffs. “Coming from the girl with the purple Punk Princess streaks.”

She’s never felt more tired in her life, and there’s something more comforting than it should be in lying beside him in the dark, not arguing, just listening to him talk until the words start to blur together and her mind goes blissfully blank.

Her mother did always say she liked the sound of her own voice. 

 


	4. never touched somebody like the way I've touched your body

When the alarm goes off in the morning, Rebecca is already gone.

Not before she’d taken the time to pre-emptively exert some damage control, he notes as he spots the outfit she’s laid out for him at the end of the bed. A warm flutter of recognition pulses through him at the items she’s chosen and he wonders if ample experience in taking that particular brassier off will afford him any advantage in getting it on (turns out the answer is if anything, barely).

What she _had_ failed to provide was the footwear, though, and perhaps he’s been a little ambitious, picking out the beige pair with the blood red soles he’s always found himself oddly transfixed by. The extra height had seemed good in theory but he thinks he may have vastly overestimated his ability to master the ability of walking in heels, his suspicions quickly confirmed by the mockingly sympathetic expression on Rebecca’s face when she catches him wobbling through the lobby in her Louboutins.

“Yeah… why you doing that to yourself, buddy?” she asks.

“Oh, you know me,” he shoots back, unimpressed. “Suffering for fashion.”

Rebecca falls into step beside him—as much as is as humanly possible, the way both of them are so laughably off-rhythm—and they sidle into the elevator together.

“So,” she begins, drawing the word out then trailing off into nothing.

“You slipped out early.”

“Yeah,” she says, and he doesn’t miss the way she straightens a little and tugs at her tie. Her Pinterest-board half-Windsor still leaves something to be desired and he batts her hand away, ignoring her audible gulp when he sets about fixing it himself. “I wanted to get out before Heather woke up,” she adds.

“Ah.”

He smooths down the tie and gives her another once-over. The hair is a lot more mohawk than his usually side-sweep, and he internally cringes at what his father would think.

They seperate at the cheerful ding of the elevator doors announcing their arrival at the third floor. It’s still early, and only a skeleton staff of employees are in—Paula amongst them—and despite several weeks’ worth of growing lax amidst his post-Rebecca-rejection spirals, Nathaniel’s still unaccustomed to not being the first. He prefers, as a rule, to settle into his office in silence in the building’s barebones lighting before everything properly kicks into gear for the day ahead; likes to feel like this is his kingdom, and he is still in some semblance of control.

Not that he feels in control of anything, right now, stuck in someone else’s body for the foreseeable future with no idea how to swap himself back.

“Cute,” Paula says when she sees them. At their twin confused looks she gestures towards them with her coffee mug and says, “Look at you two, dressed all matchy-matchy like you’re going to prom, or something.”

Nathaniel glances down at the colours in his floral skirt and notices for the first time the way in which they’re perfectly complemented by the suit and tie Rebecca’s sporting, promptly shooting her an accusing look.

“Wow. Must be our impenetrable mind meld,” she says.

It’s disconcerting, watching his features twitch and rearrange themselves into something so foreign yet familiar. How the hell are they meant to fool anyone, he wonders, when the eyes are his but the mischievous twinkle in them is someone else completely; when the line of the mouth is pedigree Plimpton but the impish grin commanding it is inexplicably Rebecca Bunch. 

Rebecca’s used to smiling a lot more toothily than he does, the unstoppable force of her emotions commanding every available outlet in its entirety. It’s unnerving, seeing his mouth pulled so wide, the grin spreading across every corner of his face. Apparently Paula thinks so too, judging by the funny look she flashes in Rebecca’s direction.

“You’re awful chipper this morning,” Paula comments. “You chow down one of those cauliflower-kale monstrosities on the way over?”

“If you must know,” Rebecca says, jutting out her chin, “I just had a really good night’s sleep.”

“Huh,” Paula answers with a hint of wistfulness to her tone. “Wish I remembered what that felt like. Haven’t had one of those since 2001.”

Nathaniel rearranges the unfamiliar muscles in his face into something he hopes conveys some level of sympathy before excusing himself with a nod.

Rebecca comes bounding after him a few seconds later.

“What did we say about walking normally, hmm?” 

“This _is_ me walking normally, dude, so get over it,” she says. “You think our cover’s going to be blown by me walking like I have a stick up my ass and you having an extra spring in your step? Worst case scenario, Paula’s gonna think we got laid. Which is the story we decided we were going with, anyway.”

“ _You_ decided,” he corrects, a lot more crisply than intended.

They reach the doorway to Darryl’s office, Nathaniel’s hand curling around the handle. Something hot-headed and petty percolates on the tip of his tongue but he bites it back, reminding himself that they’ve called for a ceasefire. When he stops instead of entering, though, turning on his heel to face her, Rebecca bumps into him with a grunt.

For the first time since leaving her house this morning he feels some satisfaction in his choice of footwear, every reclaimed inch worth it as he tilts his chin up, staring her down, gratified she isn’t towering over him as much as she could be.

Rebecca’s lips— _his_ lips—part in a surprised little ‘o’, eyes widening in a mimic of the movement, and the arm holding his briefcase works itself between them until she’s gripping its handle with both hands, wielding it something like a shield.

A strange look flits across her face that he can’t decipher.

“So I’m just going to be at my desk,” she announces, then makes a beeline for his office before he can say another word.

* * *

If she’s honest she's always kind of wondered what it would be like to have a dick.

If you’d asked a younger, more ignorant, more carefree Rebecca Bunch what the first thing she’d do upon finding herself trapped inside the body of the opposite sex would be, she’d have had a list of suggestions a mile long, each point inevitably lewder than the last.

Hypotheticals are a lot different to reality, though, and as with most things, the actual situation as it stood was a lot more nuanced than that. Dumb _what if_ questions exchanged at slumber parties didn’t tend to account for the actuality of the _trapped_ part—and as it turned out, that particular brand of panic managed to win out over any potential novelty in suddenly being in possession of a penis. There’d been the occasional errant thought about the decidedly un-streamlined quality to the design—the impracticality of having something so awkwardly positioned—but the investigative impulse had stopped there. She’d had other things to worry about in its place, like wondering how they were supposed to go about switching back, and somehow fooling everyone around them into believing everything was perfectly normal, and processing the fact that one of her best friends was planning to get married at the end of the week on a whim.

For the first two days, at least. And then finally getting a decent night’s sleep was apparently all the encouragement Nathaniel’s body needed to start redirecting blood flow back towards certain non-vital organs.

She’s no stranger to the early morning phenomenon; she’s spent enough time with enough guys to be well enough acquainted. She’s no stranger to Nathaniel’s in particular, even, and has reaped the benefits once or twice (though it’s been an excessive stretch of months since they’ve shared a bed long enough for it to come up—pun absolutely intended) but to be fair there’s an arguable difference between waking to something sandwiched against the back of your thigh and being the person providing the lunchmeat in question.

Nathaniel, to her relief, had still been down and out for the count, curled towards the left edge of her mattress and hugging a pillow against his chest, sleep-tousled hair falling in a messy curtain across his face. He’s never been a snorer but stuck with her sinus cavity it seems that he is; a muffled, rickety noise vibrating through the stray strands with every measured exhalation.

The way she sees it, there’s nothing remotely charming in that particular image—if anything, being in a position to observe herself drooling into a pillow is pretty high on her list of off-putting. They hadn’t woken up entangled, thankfully—each having politely kept to their respective half of the bed throughout the night. It just so turns out that having a perfectly logical, scientific, physiological explanation for the physical manifestation in question doesn’t make it any less awkward when you’re lying sprawled out alongside your ex, long before you even touch on the added complication of your current shared predicament.

She’d slipped out silently, showered, and had been relieved to find it disappeared at some point along the way.

The outfits had been an honest mistake, one she’d found kind of amusing once Paula had pointed it out. But the flash of the red soles of his shoes in front of her had made her think absently of the night she’d slipped out of them in the elevator, of the way they’d let their guards down on the floor until the lights had come back on, sending her scrambling, fumbling back into them and then stumbling forward until she’d kissed him anyway. Couldn’t help but let her thoughts drift to the last time she’d worn that blouse, that bra—the way he’d hiked that skirt up around her waist so she could cradle him between her thighs as she perched precariously atop an old photocopier. Until he’d stopped so suddenly in front of her, bodies colliding, and somehow every offhand thought had liquified into something that slid right out of her brain and travelled southward, congregating in a location she could do without calling attention to. 

Making a hasty retreat to the safety of his office, she’d opened Nathaniel’s laptop and set about skimming his inbox for a suitable distraction, an email from corporate enquiring after the status of her bar appeal giving her suitable pause; she’s barely had time to process the messy implications of her return to work amidst other, more demanding issues occupying the forefront of her mind. The stuffy, HR-heavy bureaucratese does little to assuage the pressing urgency of her situation downstairs, however, and she slams the computer closed with a huff.

She’s still cycling through every breathing exercise from therapy she has in her arsenal when Maya sticks her head in the door.

“There’s a call for you on line three. Do you want to take it now or should I ask them to call back later?” she asks.

“Maya, get _out_ ,” Rebecca snaps, far more harshly than intended, unable to keep the panicky shake out of her voice and closing her eyes with an embarrassed sigh when Maya scampers away with a tiny yelp.

“Alright, let’s just take a deep breath, and calm down.” She goes back to inhaling deeply through her nose and exhaling long and slow through her mouth. “C’mon… Captain,” she says, unable to keep the grimace off her face as she reluctantly forms the words, hoping to elicit some response in the form of a familiar pep talk. “This is not the time nor the place, so if you could just, like, pull the pin on this and deflate already, that would be very much appreciated.”

“Sorry,” Maya squeaks, wincing as she reappears in the doorway. “But just to clarify—was that a ‘call back later’ on line three?”

Rebecca looks up from her lap, nostrils flaring, and fixes the administrative assistant with the most withering look she can muster.

“I’ll let them know you’re in a meeting for the rest of the day,” Maya expels in a rush, yanking the door shut behind her.

* * *

“Alright, spill.”

Nathaniel looks up from his salad just as Paula slides unannounced into the seat opposite. “Excuse me?”

“You and Nathaniel, dummy—what’s the whole deal? You two have gone from not speaking for _weeks_ to some weird game of… fancy dress chicken yesterday, to practically waltzing in here this morning in a couple’s costume? What’s that about?”

Sighing deeply as she proceeds to unpack a lunch and a whole stack of papers, implying he’s lost any chance of finishing his meal break in peace, he squares his shoulders, unruffled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, so we’re doing that again? Really? Okay.” Paula gives him a knowing look before tearing a piece off her croissant and stuffing it into her mouth, turning her attention to the file spread out beside her. “Just try and keep it out of the supply closet, this time. I’ve only just started being able to go back in there without grimacing.”

Nathaniel feels the frown deepening on his face and can only imagine what the pout looks like, carved into Rebecca’s features. 

His eyes can’t help but drift over Paula’s shoulder towards his office, his contemplation switching swiftly to confusion when he spots Rebecca, sunk oddly down in the chair she’s pushed back from the desk, jabbing intermittently at the flats of her thighs.

“You’ll have to excuse me a moment,” he tells Paula, earning himself a noncommittal wave in response as he pushes to his feet and makes his way over.

Rebecca doesn’t even notice him when he gets to the doorway, her gaze firmly fixed on her lap.

“What are you doing?”

She all but jumps at the sound of his voice—technically _her_ voice—and slides the chair forward so fast she almost slams into the desk with the force of it. “What do you want?”

“You haven’t left this office all day. It’s after one-thirty. Shouldn’t you be three quarters of the way into a two hour donut break by now?”

“We’re playing nice, now, remember?” she says, tone clipped. “I’m trying to limit my donut consumption to outside of work hours.”

Still suspicious, Nathaniel lets the door fall shut behind him and steps closer.

He doesn’t miss the way her eyes slide down the length of his body before she scrunches them shut, making a vaguely frustrated noise in the back of her throat. She makes a move to cross her legs and then seems to think better of it at the last minute, rearranging them so that she’s twisted away from him at an odd angle.

“Wait a second, I know that face,” he says, frowning. “Did you just—”

“No,” she says quickly, shifting awkwardly again in her seat. “I didn’t just anything, so if you could leave, that would be great.”

His brain cycles through a smorgasbord of confusion, amusement and horror before settling on flat-out disbelief. “Really? From looking at yourself? You’re that vain?”

“Dude, it’s not my fault that your body has, like, a Pavlovian response to my body.”

“ _You_ chose this outfit.”

She widens her eyes at him. “It’s a good outfit. Now get out!”

“You know what—fine.”

Throwing his hands up in an _I’m-not-even-going-to-touch-on-this_ kind of motion, he pivots with every intention of returning to his half-eaten salad, Paula’s penchant for personal chitchat suddenly sounding like a welcome alternative.

“Wait!” Rebecca blurts out, and he pauses with his hand on the door. “I changed my mind. I need your help.”

He turns towards her, eyebrows raised expectantly.

“Okay, so we may have a bit of a problem,” she says, fidgeting. “I’ve been kind of hard all day save for the hour or so between me peeing in the shower this morning and you getting to work and while that’s been just, you know—” She balls her hands up into fists and punches one in his direction. “—tonnes of fun, it’s starting to get kinda painful and I need you to make it go away.”

He stares blankly at her while he processes this onslaught of information. “What? What do you expect me to do about it?”

“It’s your body!”

“Yeah, and I’m kind of currently on vacation from it!”

“But you know how it works! Can’t you just… talk to it, or something?”

Face scrunching in a way he hopes conveys just how ludicrous he finds that suggestion, he offers back, “Can’t you?”

Evidently wholly dissatisfied with his response, Rebecca pushes to her feet, gesturing dramatically at her crotch. “I tried—does it look like it worked?”

“Oh, put that away,” he complains, shielding his face with his hand. “You’re going to take somebody’s eye out. Can’t you just tuck it into your waistband like everybody else?”

As much as he’d really like nothing more than to turn around and _nope_ out of this entire conversation, he hates that she does have a point—whether he’s the one currently occupying it or not, it’s _his_ body that’s currently modelling the whole tent-in-trousers look, and supposes he does owe it to her to offer some advice.

Dropping back into her chair with a huff, Rebecca opens his computer and gestures to the screen. “So I googled what to do in this situation, and reddit user sexpert69 had some very helpful insight. Apparently prolonged erections can cause long term tissue damage, infertility, ongoing erectile dysfunction—”

“Could you maybe keep it down, hmm?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she mocks, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Did you not want the entire office to hear about my RAGING—”

He lunges forward and smothers the rest of her exclamation before she can get it out. “What is wrong with you?” he hisses. At her incredulous look he adds, “ _Other_ than that—which has been established, loud and clear, thank you.”

The second his hand leaves her mouth she launches right back into it. “I’ve tried holding my breath. I’ve tried jumping jacks. I’ve tried reading electronic archives of Audra Levine’s annual letters for Yom Kippur. I’ve tried _everything_. _Nothing_ is working.”

Nathaniel clears his throat, shifting back and forth on his feet. “Everything?” he prods. “Even…?”

She stares at him, uncomprehending for a moment until he makes a crude hand gesture to demonstrate.

“You’ve given hand jobs before,” he says. “Hell, you’ve given me hand jobs before. It’s relatively straightforward—you two are already acquainted.”

“What? No! Gross, dude. I’m not touching your dick,” she hisses. 

He pulls a face at her. “What, you think it bites, all of a sudden?”

He’s surprised, if he’s completely honest, knowing Rebecca and her sexual proclivities like he does. He would have thought she’d be all over _that_ particular aspect of their switch without a second thought, her well-documented lack of self control winning out in the name of curiosity. 

It’s certainly the most obvious solution, and the idea of her touching him—touching his body while they’re stuck like this—leaves him a little lightheaded and prickly under the collar.

“Is this, like, a consent thing? Because I’m fine with it, okay? Do what you have to do.”

She looks truly pained as her teeth sink into her bottom lip, eyes wide and pleading for some reason he can’t understand.

“What? What is that look? You want me to do it for you?” His stomach lurches at the way she tilts her head and shrugs, his eyebrows skyrocketing up his forehead. He has to turn away from her, dragging a hand down over his face and praying for patience. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I know it sounds weird, but hear me out,” she begs. 

He rolls his eyes. “I’m not jerking you off in the office bathroom, Rebecca. No matter what you say.”

“It’s just… there needs to be rules, okay? And boundaries. You and I are broken up and… pretending to not be broken up while we’re trapped in each other’s bodies to avoid sounding crazy, and we don’t need to make that any harder than it needs to be. So, I think taking liberties with each other’s bodies should be off the table.”

He stares at her. “How is what you’re proposing any less weird? You _do_ realise you still have to be present for it.”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to _enjoy_ it,” she argues. “And it’s fine. I’ll just… close my eyes.”

“Not happening.”

This time when he turns to leave he’s stopped by the sound of her leaping out of her seat to follow him, the wheels of his leather chair scraping along the floor and the metal of the chassis connecting with the rear filing cabinet with a resonating clunk.

“If you don’t help me I’ll have to walk through the office like this,” she calls out. “Yeah. And everyone will see. And it’ll be just like junior year all over again, with everybody laughing at you.”

Eyes narrowing, he decides to call her bluff. “Great. Go ahead. I’m not ashamed of my own virility. Need I remind you that I’ve involuntarily voided myself in front of these people? You think I’m going to be fazed by you strolling around with a boner?”

In lieu of a response Rebecca pushes past him through the door, chin jutted upwards and hands settling into her pockets as she practically cake-walks forwards, leading with her crotch. He stands rooted to the spot, telling himself he’s fine with it for approximately five seconds before the sweat trickling down the back of his neck wins out and he rushes after her, intercepting her when she’s halfway towards the break room where Paula is still absorbed in her studying, oblivious. Gulping, he grabs her by the tie and all but drags her in the direction of the men’s bathroom.

“What happened to our truce, hmm?” he asks once he’s shoved her inside, one arm still braced against the door as if to barricade her, not particularly proud of the way his breath is coming in shallow, panicked pants. “And isn’t this technically sexual harassment? Propositioning me for sexual favours at work?”

“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you,” she says snidely, shrugging herself out of his grasp. “And if anything, it’s… it’s your body that’s sexually harassing _me._ ”

He lets out a sardonic bark of laughter at that. “Right. Okay.” 

They stand regarding each other for a moment, the only sound in the room the faint hum of the overhead fluorescents and Nathaniel’s uneven breathing.

“So are we doing this?” Rebecca asks, eyebrows raised as her fingers curl around her belt buckle.

He reaches down to snub the lock on the door.

She fumbles with unfastening the belt so he knocks her aside, opening the front of her slacks with what he hopes is cool, removed concentration. He pauses once she’s down to her underwear, reluctance re-emerging briefly only to be squashed by the sight of his maroon cotton boxers as they’re revealed to him.

“Really?” he says, dropping his hands and taking a step back. “You colour-coordinated our underwear, too?”

“You’re the one that was so concerned about tonings yesterday,” she grumbles. “And the outfits were an accident, I already told you.”

He hums like he doesn’t believe her, and adequately distracted by their back-and-forth he’s able to tug down the waistband with minimal fuss, only recoiling a little when Rebecca’s erection— _god_ , this whole situation is just too fucking much—springs up towards him, released of its confines. 

Rebecca pulls a face and twists her upper body backwards like she’s never seen a penis before and his features fight it out between exasperated eye-roll and absurd laughter in response. 

“This is crazy,” he tells her in the mirror. 

“Just… just hurry up. What are you waiting for? Do you need me to spit in your hand, or something?”

Jesus Christ.

He pumps out some lotion from the dispenser on the counter and steels himself with a shaky breath before stepping forward and wrapping his hand around the length of it, surprised at how much bigger it feels in Rebecca’s tiny hand. Her hips jerk and she lets out a startled little _oh_ that hits him right in the stomach and yeah—this was not a good idea. 

His grip tightens, and Rebecca bucks back into him with a strangled moan.

“Be _quiet_ ,” he tells her, and she splutters her muffled protest against the free hand he holds over her mouth. “I thought you were closing your eyes.”

The mirror makes it better, in a way—he can relate the whole thing back to his own reflection even if right now it isn’t really his. Pretend this is just another one of their late-night office trysts, and that it’s him that’s gripping the porcelain of the basin so hard his knuckles turn white and not Rebecca. 

But behind her, Rebecca’s own body is far from immune.

His skin is hyperaware of every place of contact and close proximity between them, focused for the most part where he’s holding her but narrowed to an acute, electric point where his leg brackets hers and the blue wool of her trousers grazes the bare inside of his knee, his chest alight with static every time she shifts and brushes back against his bowstring-taut body. He’s trying to ignore the heat pooling in his stomach and sinking, slick and viscous, down low between his thighs; the way he has to actively resist the urge to press them together and squeeze.

He’s supposed to be going for impassivity, not finesse, but he can’t help but feel like his technique’s on show, attentive to keeping the twist of his strokes firm and consistent. Every time his thumb slips over the tip Rebecca sucks her lips into her mouth and ducks her head, her entire frame tensing, and he hates the burst of gratification that follows it with each repetition.

_I thought you weren’t supposed be to enjoying_ this, he wants to murmur in her ear, but he’s trying not to think about it too hard—the little noises she’s making and the way her jaw’s gone slack. Doesn’t realise he’s minutely mirroring her movements until his hips knock into hers and she grunts at him in surprise.

He doesn’t mean to do it—doesn’t mean to succumb and let his eyes scrunch shut; doesn’t know what he’s doing until he’s done it, his face twisting to the side so that it’s buried in her neck, his nose scraping against the sinews there, synthesising a shudder that sends her whole body canting forwards, like it’s trying to pour itself into his palm.

Her fly eyes open suddenly. “Nathaniel, I—”

Her hand reaches back to fist in his shirt and it’s too late—she’s shooting off like an inexperienced teenager, gasping, leaning into him and spilling hot into his hand.

“Jesus, Rebecca. A little warning would have been nice,” he says with a grimace, holding his coated fingers out over the sink and trying to be stern over the way the blood is pounding in his ears.

“Well I’m sorry if I haven’t done this before,” she tries to snap back, but it’s obvious she’s too loose to muster up any real sort of malice.

She lets her eyes flutter shut and rests against him, arms still braced against the sink, and for a moment it’s like they’re back in the supply closet, breaths hot on each other’s necks as they come down. Nathaniel pauses in the midst of cleaning up the mess she just made and regards their reflection in the mirror, the two of them flushed and loosely intertwined.

He watches the way her hands shake as she refastens her pants and he feels hot all over, and vaguely like he can’t breathe.

“You’re on your own from now on,” he says, embarrassed by the way his voice cracks as he dries himself on the hand towel, clears his throat and pulls away.

“Fine,” she huffs out.

He pretends he can’t feel her eyes on him in the mirror as he leaves.

* * *

She can’t help it, when she glances up from the legal brief she must have read ten times now without remotely absorbing to see the stiff set of her own shoulders where Nathaniel has sequestered himself in the break room to poke gingerly at the remnants of a salad with a fork—the last bit of glue holding her admittedly very thin layer of composure together starts to dissolve and disappear.

“Where are you going?” Nathaniel asks when he spots her heading for the exit. He drops his plastic fork and pushes to his feet to follow her.

“Donuts,” she says, just to piss him off, not slowing in her determined beeline for the elevator.

“Stop putting junk in my body.”

She turns around to hammer the close button before crossing her arms over her chest. “Yeah, well—quit putting rabbit food in mine.”

It’s probably not the best look, she realises, her leaving the office early for the second day in a row. Nathaniel’s work ethic has always been, notably, the complete polar opposite to her own, even if usurping the role of senior partner had helped her muster up some semblance of a stronger sense of responsibility. Nathaniel’s recent abscondment to the Californian call of the wild left her with a little leeway for unpredictability, however, and the fact of the matter was the office walls were closing in on her right now to the point that she felt like she couldn't breathe. 

In an attempt to ease the flow of oxygen and soothe the heat prickling along the nape of her neck, she tugs loose the tie he’d so diligently retied for her that morning and lets her forehead drop forward to rest against the cool, crisp metal of the elevator doors. 

_God_ , what the hell had she been thinking?

It had seemed so pragmatic, so practical to her at the time. Something about the idea of taking it in hand, taking care of it herself had felt too intimate, too much like leaving room for fantasy. Making it his problem instead of hers simply removed her own messy feelings from the equation.

Except for the part where his touch had turned her blood to lava, seething through her with all the force of a volcanic eruption, filling her field of vision like some weird kind of point-of-view porn—did anybody actually _like_ those?—and opening the floodgates to a deluge of unwelcome evocations of the two of them and the things they’d managed to do to each other behind the luxury of other locked doors. Scrunching her eyes shut had only made it worse, somehow; made it easier for the memories to manifest and take hold.

The elevator doors open out into the lobby and she composes herself with a deep breath, burgundy silk tie still grasped tightly in hand.

It’s a therapy reflex that has her pausing to consider calling her psychiatrist. While the panic is far from fully-fledged, the added out-of-sorts sensation of not being grounded in her body generates the impulse to seek a more substantial tether. Just as quickly as the urge washes over her she knows she has to dismiss it, though—Nathaniel is not Dr Akopian’s patient, and she can already imagine the fit he’d pitch if she did him the embarrassment of seeking out a psychologist in his skin.

By uncanny coincidence, her phone chooses precisely that moment to chirp a reminder, the appearance of the offending application on her screen sobering her instantly.

“Shit,” she mutters to herself, stuffing the phone in her pocket and stomping off in the direction of Nathaniel’s car.

* * *

He breathes a sigh of relief at the absence of what he’s discerned to be Heather’s car from the driveway when he eventually makes it back to Rebecca’s house that evening, a low-cal takeaway meal that has her stomach gurgling disapprovingly bagged in the seat beside him.

Heather may not be home but her soon-to-be-husband unfortunately is, humming along to the radio as he empties and refills the dishwasher in the kitchen.

“Hey, Rebecca,” Hector says cheerfully when he hears him come in.

“Hi.” After some consideration, Nathaniel makes himself add carefully, “How are you?”

Hector’s too focused on making sense of the multitude of buttons adorning the dishwasher’s interface to even process his greeting, though, and Nathaniel sets his carrier bag down on the table, unconcerned with the resulting silence. Seconds later an electronic chime and whirring sound seems to signify Hector’s programming victory, and the surfer’s attention returns to the matter of the basket of clean cutlery and his seemingly recently retuned-home roommate.

“Hey, so… you know Heather pretty well, right? I mean, you two have lived together awhile now.”

Apprehension starts to claw its way uninvited up Nathaniel’s spine. They _really_ need to sort out an alternate living arrangement—or in the very least some kind of schedule—because he’s growing to intensely loathe the pervasive unprepared-for-pop-quiz feeling peppering his every exchange with Rebecca’s overly familiar housemates.

“…sure,” he manages, entirely unconvincingly.

“So would you say that you’re surprised, at all, by the fact that we’re married now and she’s still acting exactly like she did before we got married? Does that come as a shock, to you?”

“Wait,” Nathaniel interrupts, pausing in his unpacking of his madras chicken curry. “You guys are already married?”’

He’d considered eating in the car to avoid precisely this kind of contact, his tolerance for social interactions relatively low on the best of days, let alone ones that came with in-built booby-traps like this one, lying in wait to trip him up on every dramatic aspect of Rebecca’s life of which he has no clue.

Hector shoots him a funny look. “Yeah—I mean, technically. We went to the courthouse on Heather’s lunch break? Because of the insurance thing? I thought she told you all this.”

Nathaniel attempts to school his confusion into a guise of recognition. “Right. I mean, I’m sure she did and I just forgot.” Relieved when the tired but vaguely fond look he receives in response seems to suggest he’s adequately channelled Rebecca, he adds, “Good for you. That’s… really romantic, man.”

The bowl Hector was wiping down hits the countertop with a thunk, and Nathaniel has to jerk backwards in his seat to narrowly avoid being clipped by the dishtowel the other man flings over his shoulder. “No,” he says. “It’s _not._ That’s my point.”

“…okay.” He starts shovelling curry into his mouth as an excuse not to engage any further.

“She never wants anything to be a big deal, but it is a big deal. Marriage is a big deal!”

The too-large mouthful burns on the way down, both from the spice and the pressure on his windpipe. “Well, have you told Heather that?”

“Yeah, and she just brushed me off. You know what she’s like— _nothing_ fazes her.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Nathaniel says with a sympathetic shrug. “Women are… very confusing.”

He’s recused from having to pursue the topic of conversation any further by the sound of his phone vibrating on the table. Grateful for the reprieve, he drops his fork and snatches it up before Hector can look any closer and notice the lock screen is not Rebecca’s.

Which, incidentally, is exactly who's messaging him, and the sight of her name in the notification bar causes an unwelcome twinge low in his gut.

_I’m outside. Can we talk?_

They haven’t spoken since the bathroom, save for her brusque explanation for her early exit from the office, and while some kind of debrief is almost definitely in order, he kind of thought he’d have the evening to himself to unpack everything first. An unsettling, unidentifiable emotion starts to ricochet through his rib cage, turning his chest cavity into some kind of pinball machine, manic and breakneck, refusing to re-route.

Rebecca’s pacing on the porch when he opens the door, hands stuffed deep inside her pockets. She glances up at the sound and when his eyes land on her face the shiny chrome ball turns to lead and drops down hard into the pit of his stomach.

“So, uh, I know things are kind of, shall we say… awkward between us right now,” she begins, rocking on her feet and choosing to ignore the decidedly _that’s-an-understatement_ look he flashes her in response, “but we need to talk about something that’s going to be a little uncomfortable for both of us, and I need for you to not be weird about it because it’s important, okay?”

He sighs. “Rebecca, if this is about what happened earlier, I—”

“It’s not,” she interrupts, firm. “So can you let me in?”

He only hesitates a moment before swinging the door open wider.

* * *

“…and this one’s kind of just your basic mood stabiliser, nothing too hardcore. So yeah. That’s… those.” 

They’re standing in front of her dresser, several prescription bottles spread out on the surface between them. 

Rebecca looks down at her feet, forefinger still lingering on the last label, not meeting his eyes, and he hates the way she makes the meekness look on him.

“Wow,” he says. “I didn’t, uh, realise you…”

“Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they’re not the most important part of what I do, but they’re a part, so. Yeah.”

Buzzing with nervous energy, Rebecca plops herself down on the end of the bed then immediately stands back up, restless in her uncertainty in a way that almost makes him feel calm in comparison.

“Do you take them, because you’re in my body?” she wonders out loud, wringing her hands. “Or do I take them, because I’m the one with the disorder, and I’m me? They didn’t exactly cover this in my workbooks.”

“Can we just… not… take them?” he offers. “Is that an option?”

He can’t help it—he’s blanching hard on the inside just looking at them. 

His father had a wealth of sayings about over-the-counter pain meds—that ibuprofen was an excuse for your immune system to take a nap, that Tylenol was just sleep aid for babies. The withering look he’d received for so much as daring to reach for a lozenge during his debilitating bout of mono in college was still ingrained in the back of his mind. Prescriptions didn’t warrant the same level of dismissal, of course—they came from doctors, after all, and doctors were to be respected—but there was still a degree of disdain for deigning to require treatment in the first place. Nathaniel also knows exactly what his father would have to say on the credibility of the kind of doctors Rebecca frequented, nothing amongst it favourable.

Under all that, though—the paternal platitudes he spent his childhood learning and re-enacting by rote—there’s that queasy feeling in his stomach and the tightness in his throat that rises up in him unbidden at the association of Rebecca and a bottle of pills, the heady smell of chlorine burned into his brain that he now associates with something other than water polo and the inevitable slide towards that memory of his mother, motionless on her bedroom floor.

The unmistakable trepidation written into every inch of Rebecca’s face tells him this is exactly the reaction she was worried about receiving, so he digs his nails into his palms and makes himself swallow it down.

She frowns, clearly torn. “No, I think you should take them. It makes sense. My body, my bloodstream. It’s the most logical to me. Besides, if by some reason I do get kind of thrown out by it, I’m the one more equipped to handle that. It’s not… your problem.”

It’s the most rational option, and a part of him knows it’s the right one. Knows how unwieldy he’s felt since being in her skin, unsettled in a way he’s not sure he can entirely chalk up to mere displacement-disorientation. 

He points to a holographic compact, emblazoned with the words _DONUT FORGET_ and illustrated accordingly, still tucked inside the plastic bag the bottles had come from. “And this?”

“Uh, straight up sex candy,” she says, rocking on the balls of her feet. At his confused look she elaborates, “Birth control. It’s birth control.”

He gives an uncomfortable titter. “Right.”

She snatches the bag up and stuffs it unceremoniously back into her sock drawer. “We’re, uh… we’re still easing back onto those, though, what with all the stuff I’ve had going on recently—namely being incarcerated—so we’re not going to worry about that.”

A small respite, he begrudgingly muses. Being trapped in a woman’s body was jarring enough without adding insult to injury by having to shoot up oestrogen on the side.

“Problem number two,” she says, picking up one of the near-empty bottles and giving it a half-hearted shake, “is that we need a new prescription. Which means bailing on therapy this week isn’t an option.” She pauses, then adds, “Plus, Dr Akopian has, like, a $250 cancellation fee, and since I’ve only been back at work a grand total of two days my bank account hasn’t really bounced back from the whole me being in the slammer thing.”

“You want me to go see your shrink?” he asks, incredulous. “Rebecca—”

“Okay, but aside from the fact that you could almost definitely benefit from some therapy yourself—don’t worry, I have a plan. It’ll be fine, I promise. You just… deal with these, okay?”

She drops back down onto the bed, managing to stay put this time. He wants to ask her if she’s planning on spending the night again—and after how on-edge he’s felt since their earlier encounter, he’s really hoping the answer is in the negative—but her phone starts ringing before he can bring it up.

Nathaniel’s never met Rebecca’s mom—only seen her from afar at her would-be wedding—but he instantly recognises both the name on the screen and the reaction it immediately instills in Rebecca. During their eight-month office co-habitation he’d been privy to more than one of their mother-daughter phone calls, and more often than not they’d left Rebecca looking exhausted, on-edge. The way he often felt after dealing with his father.

“What are you waiting for?” Rebecca hisses, nudging it in his direction. “Pick up.”

“What? I can’t talk to her,” he shoots back, realising as soon as he’s spoken how absurd it is that he’s whispering.

“Dude, pick up. I’m not kidding. She’s relentless.”

“I’m not talking with your mom, okay? That’s a disaster waiting to happen. We’ll ignore it, she’ll hang up, and you can text her back later.” 

The phone falls silent approximately ten seconds later, and he raises a self-satisfied eyebrow. “See? Crisis easily averted.”

Until the doorbell rings, and Rebecca shoots him a pointed look before making her way down the hall and out towards the entranceway.

“Rebecca—you’re home,” a middle aged lady with a regrettable bowl cut announces, clucking her tongue and pushing past her into the house. “Why aren’t you answering your phone? Your mother’s worried sick about you. Here.”

She thrusts a cell phone that looks like it went out of production some time in the late 90s into Nathaniel’s hand, much to his bemusement and Rebecca’s haughty _I told you so_ glare.

“Thanks?” he says, confused, and raises the phone to his ear. “Mom?”

“Why aren’t you answering your phone?” Naomi demands in lieu of a reply. “What if there was an emergency and I needed you to drive me to the hospital? Do you ever think about anyone other than yourself, hmm?”

“Well, we’re in separate states, for starters, so maybe I’m not the best choice in that particular situation,” Nathaniel says with a strong intonation of tested patience that has Rebecca screwing up her mouth and stepping on his foot despite him knowing for a fact she’s said far worse. “Was there something you needed, Mom? I’m kind of… busy right now.”

“Busy? What kind of busy? Becca, are you with a boy? Is that why you’re ignoring your mother’s calls? Unbelievable. The lengths I go to for you, and this is how you repay me…”

“It’s for work,” he cuts in quickly when Rebecca starts mouthing at him, her accompanying hand gestures encouraging him to play it up. “Real important case with a real important client. Very high profile. Lot of money for the firm. Can I call you back?”

“Call me back?” Naomi echoes. “I guess I’ll add it to the list of things I won’t hold my breath for, like a birthday gift I don’t have to hide in the linen closet when I have company or for you to find a hairstyle that doesn’t make your face look like an overstuffed _kishke_.”

Nathaniel frowns deeply. “Yeah, I’m hanging up now,” he says, and pushes the disconnect button.

Just as he’s passing back the phone to its rightful owner—and still somewhat scandalised by that parting remark—Hector strolls into the kitchen, opening the fridge door with a rattle and reaching for a bottle of water.

“Oh hey, Mrs Edelstein,” he greets as he unscrews the lid, already starting back down the hall. “Did your cat get stuck in our yard again? Tell Chairman Meow I said hi.”

“Look, Mrs Edelstein,” Rebecca interrupts before the woman in question can reply. “It was real nice of you to stop by, and your neighbourly spirit continues to be truly impressive, really, but we’re kind of in the middle of something, here—”

“I don’t know you,” Mrs Edelstein sputters as she’s shepherded towards the exit. “Who are you?”

“I’m Rebecca’s work colleague, Nathaniel. Lovely to meet you, wish we had time to chat.”

“You’re tall,” the older woman observes, stumbling over the threshold and pausing on the welcome mat to give Rebecca a more thorough once-over. “Do you wash windows?”

“Not at all because I’m embarrassingly wealthy and I can pay people to do things for me, but I’ll let you know if I’m ever in need of a side hustle. Buh-bye now.” Shooing the older woman down the driveway so she can shut her out, Rebecca slumps back against the door and lets out a heavy breath. “Oh my god.”

Nathaniel can only stare at her. “What the hell just happened?”

With a lot more effort that she was apparently expecting it to require, Rebecca hauls herself back upright and fixes him with a glare. Before he can even blink she’s crossed the living room to the sofa, scooping up one of the couch cushions to aggressively hurl in his direction. He yelps and ducks a fraction of a second too late.

“That,” she says, punctuating with another pillow toss, “was Hurricane Naomi—an extreme weather event that can easily be avoided if you just—” Pillow number three hits him right in the stomach. “— _answer your phone.”_

His reflexes finally kick in quick enough to catch her last trajectory before it can connect with his shoulder, grasping the charcoal cushion high on his chest, defensive. “How the hell was I supposed to know your mother’s infiltrated West Covina’s Neighbourhood Watch? Though could we maybe just have, I don’t know—not answered the door?”

Rebecca’s eyes widen almost comically. “And risk her phoning in a favour with the National Guard? No. You gotta nip that overbearing maternal invasion in the bud. The trick is disappointing her enough with your life choices that she gets pissed and ends up hanging up on you herself.”

Sparing a quick thought for Heather and the living room shambles they’re apparently leaving her to come home to, he takes Rebecca’s resigned cue and follows her back into the bedroom where she eventually stops and faces him, cell gripped tight in her hand.

“We need to swap phones,” she realises. “Switching the covers over, answering everything by text—it’s not enough. We need to be smarter, stay on top of this. Have a game plan.”

Nathaniel frowns. “What are you suggesting?”

“That we treat this like a test. The LSAT of each others’ lives, if you will. Study up. Who knows how long we’re going to be stuck like this, so we might as well buckle down. Give each other the lowdown and what we’re going to need to say to who—my mom, your dad, my shrink. All of it.”

He folds his arms, arching his back a little in order to comfortably tuck them under his breasts. What she’s suggesting makes a certain kind of sense.

“And… rules,” she gulps, straightening her shoulders. “I meant what I said earlier. There should be… boundaries.”

Her eyes flicker downwards, voice breaking at the last word. The helping hand she’d all but coerced him into lending at lunchtime had been momentarily forgotten in the midst of her mother’s call but the reality of it comes flooding back to both of them now, the residual tension settling heavy over them like a weighted blanket.

He hates how hoarse he sounds when he replies. “Such as?”

“Inappropriate touching, obviously. Off the table. Like I said, no taking liberties with each others’ bodies.”

“Not a problem for me,” he says, and it’s true—there’s been enough else to occupy his thoughts that he hasn’t felt the slightest inclination so far.

“And if a situation, uh… arises, like it did today,” she says thickly, not looking at him, “we convene and deal with it in a logical manner.”

_Right_ , he thinks. Because that’s what the weight of her in his palm and the little noises she’d made in his ear had been— _logical._

She’s fidgeting again, twisting at his cufflinks, a faint pink tinge blossoming in the tips of her ears. “I was also thinking maybe we could, um, temporarily relocate to your apartment,” she continues, tone and line of sight still hanging low. “You know, to save you from Heather and Hector and my nosy next-door neighbours.”

That particular proposal catches him off guard, even though he’s admittedly toyed with the notion himself. Given the way things recently unfolded between them, though, he’s been trying to convince himself the best plan of action is for them to give each other a wide berth.

But she has a point—without a disclosed end-date to whatever cosmic trick has frustratingly befallen them, it’s undoubtedly in their best interests to make an effort to maintain the status quo. And if keeping up appearances means keeping each other firmly in the loop of their apparently inexplicably tanged lives, it’s probably both more convenient and convincing if they do so away from prying eyes.

“So we agree,” she says, tongue darting out to wet her lips. “This is a good idea.”

He can see from the faint amusement dancing in her eyes when she thrusts out her hand that she’s going for some sort of levity, knowing exactly what moment between them she’s inevitably calling back to. It doesn’t stop her, though—she juts out her chin, smirking down her nose at him, daring him to be the one to shy away.

A million and one reasons why he should just let her have the satisfaction start up their picket line in the back of his mind, screaming their protest at every ligament and tendon working together to lift his arm away from his side. Despite the undeniable pragmatism behind her approach he’s all too aware that the electricity that starts humming through him whenever she’s around hasn’t been diluted in the slightest by their switch; he felt it surge in the bathroom earlier and he can feel it building up again like static now, desperate to close the distance and jump across. 

Surely, _surely_ , this is the worst idea imaginable.

He reaches out and wraps his fingers around hers, feeling the tingle of anticipation build at the base of his spine that one way or another, they’re about to find out.

 


	5. my body is a cage that keeps me

She blinks herself awake three minutes before the alarm.

She can feel the warmth of Nathaniel behind her, back facing hers and not pressed together but touching her in points, the flat of his right foot butting up against her calf in a way that’s foreign and familiar all at once.

It should’ve been more awkward, the two of them, back in his bed together—that situation rife enough with tension before you even began to factor in the events of the previous day. Despite the suggestion that they relocate to his apartment being her own she’d more than expected she’d be spending the night wide awake again, unable to silence the whirring gears that made up her currently-displaced mind, denied rest by the anxious loop that so easily set itself in motion in the dark. Instead she’d found herself oddly calm as they’d situated themselves in front of his coffee table, daily planners in hand, ready to catch each other up.

They’d pared everything back to the essentials. Her therapy day was usually Friday but she’d messaged Dr Akopian to move it up to Thursday so it didn’t coincide with Nathaniel’s court appearance first thing. Wednesday mornings she volunteered at the jail, and though Nathaniel had inevitably tensed at the mention he’d dutifully paid full attention as she recapped the cases he’d need to attend to. They’d swapped notes on the client she’d be representing on Friday, if it came down to it, and they agreed they could get away with him running point pending her reinstatement to the bar. Maya could redirect the brunt of her incoming calls to him, and between the two of them, they should have the brunt of their bases covered.

She’d already skipped group, so that wasn’t going to be an issue, and with a bit of reshuffling they'd managed to shirk any non-critical social engagements. Which had only left Heather and Hector’s impending impromptu wedding, something that’s still tying Rebecca’s stomach in various knots to think about.

The alarm goes off, and Nathaniel rolls over, burying his head under a pillow and grunting his protest.

She reaches over and shuts it off before flopping onto her back, thinking back to the previous evening and how they’d quietly gone about their routines and migrated to the bed and how she’d lied there, in practically the same position she was in now, strangely serene in the knowledge that they now had a plan. In a way it had reminded her of those early weeks after she’d come off the hormones, navigating the new dynamic of their shared office space in the come-down from their brief flare of animosity, still settling into a rhythm. They worked well together, she’d realised back then, at some point after she’d sued him and won and before she’d slipped and found herself back in his lap, in his arms, in whatever mess of a situation they couldn’t seem to pull themselves out of. They comfortably coexisted, when they weren’t trying so hard to prove otherwise. They balanced each other out.

She runs a hand down over her face and immediately hisses as something sharp scrapes across the sensitive skin of her palm. The second it’s brought to her attention, her entire jaw starts to break out in an itch, stinging with the sensation of hundreds of razor-sharp hairs having sliced through the skin and turned it the texture of sandpaper, each tiny one prickling against her fingertip as she pokes against her chin to investigate. Frowning, she throws back the covers and heads towards the bathroom for a closer look.

The stubble now noticeably occupying serious real estate on the lower third of her face takes her back to a different iteration of Nathaniel, one that kept his hair cropped shorter at the sides and his tone a little more clipped and that had the promise of something dangerous—something calculated—reflected in his eyes. She looks _good,_ she decides—the way her messy hair, free of product, flops down thick over her forehead and the dusting of scruff rounds out her jaw. 

“Due for a shave, huh?” Nathaniel yawns, appearing in the mirror behind her in the form of a bed-rumpled brunette. 

She whirls around to face him, pointing at her chin. “You used to look like this,” she says.

He blinks and cocks his head at her. “Okay? I mean, I still do, every three days or so when you’re not occupying my body.”

“No, this was your whole look,” she insists, shaking her head. “Then when I came back to work post-jilting you were all doe-eyed and fresh-faced, with your hair all big and full of secrets.”

“My hair all full of… what?”

“Secrets. Dude, watch a movie or two for once in your life. My point is—what made you suddenly decide to ditch the stubble?”

He frowns, confused by her line of questioning as he gently elbows her out of the way to get at the sink and splash his face. “I don’t know. The upkeep? It kind of hurts. You give maintaining that length a go for a few days and get back to me.” His eyes drop down to the t-shirt she’s wearing in the mirror, and he pulls a face. “What are you wearing, by the way? Where did you even find that?”

“It was the only thing in your closet that sparked joy for me,” she shoots back airily, waltzing back out into the apartment proper.

There’s no need for him to know that in fact almost the opposite is true; that she hadn’t been able to look at his soft heather-grey v-neck or the shirt emblazoned with _Stanford_ without flashing back to when they were something a little closer to happy, when she could turn up at his door and squirrel-leap into his arms whenever she felt like it. Back before they’d taken turns at fucking this whole thing up—the both of them—and wearing his shirts had been an act of affection and her own volition rather than an absurd necessity.

The toilet flushes just as she’s brought up the weather report on her laptop. “So there’s still a wind advisory in effect, because of course there is,” she announces when Nathaniel reemerges. “But they think it’s gonna show signs of easing by the weekend, which is exactly what I want to hear. Though sometime before Friday would be preferable. Obviously.”

She holds out her hand without looking at him and drops three pills into his palm as he passes. He accepts them without comment and detours towards his nightstand for his water bottle. When she finally glances up at him, he opens his mouth and shows her the underside of his tongue, eyebrows raised, mocking.

“Ha ha. You’re so funny.”

He disappears into the kitchen without another word.

* * *

Nathaniel eyes his blender with a hint of wistfulness as he waits for his eggs to boil.

Rebecca’s tastebuds—and her constitution, for that matter—didn’t exactly agree with his idea of breakfast food, so he’s been having to skip the smoothies in favour of something a little more substantial. She’d given him the lowdown on what he should probably avoid lest he become somewhat embarrassingly acquainted with all the joys that accompanied her Jewish stomach, all the while gleefully taking advantage of her own newfound immunity inherent in his cast-iron-by-comparison gut; there wasn’t much danger in her touching washed kale, let alone unwashed, after all, so the only real roadblock she was facing was his body’s decades-in-development inbuilt disdain for sugar—something she’s wasted no time in disregarding, he’s sure. 

Once he’s finished with his hardboiled eggs he scrapes the empty shells into the trash and heads back into the living room, where Rebecca seemingly hasn’t moved from her spot at the end of the bed until he realises she’s now half dressed, unbuttoned shirt hanging open at her shoulders and slacks as far up her legs as she can pull them without standing.

“Hey, I finished my list of people you might have to interact with today,” she says when she sees him, waving a yellow legal pad at him.

Accepting the page she rips off and thrusts at him, his eyebrows climb higher on his forehead with each additional name she’s scrawled in her chicken-scratch handwriting, subsequent summaries alongside. 

“Wow,” he says, swallowing. “That’s, uh… that’s a lot of people.”

“Really? C’mon, show me your list.”

Giving an extremely put-upon sigh, he retrieves the single sheet of his monogrammed stationery, reluctantly passing it over and steeling himself for her response. He hadn’t needed the extra time; his list is both exhaustive and extremely short and sweet.

Rebecca looks back up at him, frowning. “Your parents, a client and Whijo? That’s it?”

Her tone, though predictable, sets him on the defensive. “You already know everyone I work with. I mean, there’s also the PT at the gym, but I don’t think there’s any danger of you running into him.” He sighs and pulls his gaze away from hers. “Stop it. Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re pitying me for not having a million friends like you do.”

“Hey. This is a recent development, believe me.” She studies his face. “But don’t you ever want that? Don’t you ever want to tell someone about your day?”

Something wraps around his heart and squeezes at that, and he doesn’t know how to respond with something that isn’t _you, I wanted that with you,_ so he swallows hard and clamps his mouth shut. He had an impossible enough time getting over her when all they shared was an office, let alone inhabiting her body and having her beside him in his bed.

Thankfully, he’s saved from answering by the chiming of Rebecca’s phone.

“Huh, Heather’s trying to organise a gurl group catch up at Sugar Face for lunch,” she says, scrutinising the message as she finally finishes pulling up her pants. 

“We can tell her you’re busy,” Nathaniel suggests. “Say you have a deposition.”

“I mean, we could,” Rebecca agrees, drawing out the word. “Or, here’s a thought—you could go and try and wrangle an invite to her totally-not-out-of-left-field-definitely-should’ve-seen-it-coming surprise wedding?”

“Or, and here’s an alternative thought—you could just text her and ask if I could come?”

Rebecca pouts, and it looks so ridiculous on his face that he has to physically turn himself away from her, focusing instead on buttoning up his blouse.

“C’mon, dude—this is what we’ve been rehearsing for! Besides, dealing with them as a group is way easier. There’s two extra people to fill in the gaps in conversation.”

“That’s two extra people to initiate the conversation I’m going to have gaps for!”

She rolls her eyes. “If you don’t know how to answer something, just… stuff an entire donut in your mouth. That’s what I usually do.”

“You made me cancel drinks with Josh,” he reminds her.

“That’s because Whijo hates me,” she whines. “And if he thinks we’re back together there won’t be enough scotch in that bar to see me through an hour of what he’ll have to say about that.”

Nathaniel finishes with the blouse and steps back to present himself for inspection. Rebecca takes one look at him and bursts out laughing, climbing off the bed and padding towards him.

“What?” he asks, defensive.

“It’s just between the poofy hair and the black pants and white blouse all buttoned up, you look like… well, you,” she says, suppressing a giggle. “Come here.”

She rocks up onto her tip-toes for a moment in the split-second it takes her to realise it’s the wrong direction to mitigate their height difference, course-correcting and stepping into his personal space to reach immediately for his neckline. He’s not the only one committing an identity crisis-induced fashion faux pas, he realises, taking in the laughable picture of the pair of them in the mirror, him primly covered from head to toe and her prancing around in a ratty t-shirt and little else, long legs bare instead of chest. It could have been an adequate nightshirt on her own smaller frame, he’s sure, but as it is she’s making his body look like it belongs on some kind of avant-garde, underground Eurotrash catwalk. All it’s missing is some eyeliner and a dog collar.

He knows better than to give her any ideas.

“First of all, you’re not wearing a tie. There’s no need to button to the collar. Secondly,” she continues, unfastening to reveal an acceptable hint of cleavage, “that makes my chest look enormous.”

He frowns. “You’re the one that was yelling at me for having it hanging out the other day. And how does showing it off make it look any smaller?”

“I don’t know, it just does. And you’re not showing it off. You’re just… letting it breathe,” she says, making an accompanying airy hand motion. “Honestly, it’s an ongoing question of how much boob is too much boob, and one that we may never know the answer to.”

He makes an unconvinced humming noise as he slips into her black blazer. “I didn’t realise getting ready for work could be so complicated. And that’s forgoing most of the makeup.”

“Like you can talk. I’ve seen how many moisturisers you use.”

He twists over his shoulder to look at her. “You think it’s easy, looking that good?”

“You telling me I look good, Plimpton?”

“No, I’m telling me I look good.”

She grins at him, and he can’t help but return it.

“You realise I’m not going to remember any of this,” he tells her, folding up her list of names and slipping it into his pocket. “I appreciate you wanting to be prepared, but I can’t exactly pull out your little cheat sheet in the middle of a conversation.”

“Next time I’ll make palm cards,” she quips, then checks the time on his watch as she clips it on. “You should get a move on.”

“Yeah.” 

He’s heading towards the bed on autopilot when it hits him—pulling himself to an abrupt stop a few feet away from her when he realises with an alarming jolt he’d been about to bend down and kiss her on the cheek.

He scrunches his eyes shut to will away the strange, sleepwalking sensation that had sent him over there, his feet— _her_ feet—moving like phantom limbs, as if acting out a memory from a dream. Something in his stomach lurches unpleasantly.

Thankfully Rebecca’s none the wiser, still intent on the computer screen she’d begrudgingly switched out for his. 

“I’ll see you tonight,” he says. He hates how his voice sounds vaguely squeaky.

“Ooh,” she purrs without even looking up, waggling her eyebrows and making him embarrassed to see the silly movement on his own face. “Your place or mine?”

He frowns. “What? Mine.”

“Your place as in your place or your place as in my place?”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Enjoy jail,” Rebecca calls after him cheerfully.

He shuts the door a little too forcefully as he leaves.

* * *

She’s just finished signing off on Tim’s zoning motion when she glances up in time to see Paula heading towards the break room.

The morning had been pleasant enough—strangely unremarkable, even, given Nathaniel’s absence and the subsequent lack of body-swapped hijinks—and she’d even managed to get a decent amount of work done. Working came easier to her, in Nathaniel’s body; his limbs were less restless, his focus less fleeting, his phone far more free of distractions. Then there was the undeniable fact that rather than mill about her in their usual hive mind of unproductivity, most of the office went out of their way to avoid her entirely—and while in a sense that was welcome it was also _lonely,_ having had little but Nathaniel’s tête-à-tête for company these past few days. She missed all those mindless daily interactions, and she missed her best friend.

Before she can think any better of it, she grabs the empty mug from the corner of the desk and strides in the direction of the coffee pot.

“Paula,” she says when she gets there, going for gruffness and a curt nod. It comes out far deeper than intended, all wrong for Nathaniel no matter which way you spun it, so she covers it up with a cough and tries again, hitting the sweet spot that’s somewhere between cordial and uncaring.

Paula doesn’t say anything, instead narrowing her eyes as she stirs in her creamer. Rebecca’s been on the receiving end of the older woman’s intense scrutiny before, but devoid of the undercurrent of fondness that usually accompanies it, it occurs to her—though not for the first time—that Paula is _terrifying_ when she wants to be.

“Just know that I’m watching you, okay,” Paula informs her eventually. “Just because you’re my boss doesn’t mean I can’t end you if you hurt her.”

Paula’s tone walks the impeccable line between joviality and thinly veiled death threat, and though it’s not the first time Rebecca’s witnessed her friend’s ride or die mentality, Paula’s managed to tone it down a lot in the last few months. So seeing a slice of it now—when she’s feeling so hopelessly homesick for their friendship—all but turns her insides to goo.

“What’s that face?”

Rebecca blinks, trying to command the muscles in her cheeks into an arrangement that suggests neutrality. “Face? What face? There is no face.”

She focuses her attention on pouring her coffee, all too aware that Paula’s still staring her down.

“Hmm. Might wanna dial it back on the heart eyes there, Tin-man,” Paula says, softening suddenly, her suspicion giving way to amusement. She arches a brow as she takes a sip from her mug. “Your little semi-precious metal sleeves are showing.”

“Stop looking at my wrists,” Rebecca shoots back.

She has to fight the grin as she yanks down her cuffs, turns on her heel and flounces back towards Nathaniel’s office.

_* * *_

He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t wholly uncomfortable.

He never visited Rebecca during her official six week stint on the inside, a misgiving he was suitably ashamed about upon all-too-belated reflection. The sight of her in her state-mandated orange jumpsuit in courthouse alone had been enough to give him painful pause, her bare face washed-out and sullen, limp hair gathered back in a sloppy ponytail and free of its usual playful curl. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her look so small.

Walking through the hallways, he loathes the way the county jail hums with an air of familiarity around him—the sight of Rebecca Bunch clipping down the corridor (in kitten heels, this time—that particular lesson has been well and truly learned) draws a variety of responses, none of them affording any comfort. The security guard that signs him in eyes him warily, tight-lipped; an inmate greets him by name. He hates the idea of this place knowing Rebecca, and the idea of her knowing it back. Hates the way he can’t help but superimpose her face from that day in the courtroom—apologetic, desperate, pleading for him to understand—on every prisoner that he passes by.

When they buzz him into the room there’s two women waiting at the table for him, but neither of them match the description of the one Rebecca insisted he see. “Where’s Nicky?” he asks, frowning, setting his briefcase down.

The two women exchange glances.

“She got pulled in to see the Warden,” one of them says, and of course, _of course_ nothing can ever go to plan.

* * *

“You wanted to see me, Boss?”

Rebecca glances up from Nathaniel’s laptop screen, trying and failing to keep her eagerness in check. Shuffling some papers around on the desk as a cover, she gestures towards the seat opposite.

“Yeah—yes, I mean, yes. Sit down, please.”

Paula’s expression is wary as she obeys. “Is this about the unapproved overtime I put in on the Ternheim suit? Because I know we discussed taking—”

“It’s not about the overtime,” Rebecca interrupts, waving her hand dismissively. “That’s all signed off on. I just thought we could… talk.” She gestures back and forth between them. “You know. Get to know each other a little better.”

Paula blinks. “What? Why?”

Rebecca has to falter at that—she hasn’t exactly thought the impulse through beyond the boredom that had set in upon sitting down to poke gingerly at the chicken salad she’s brought for lunch, and getting rid of Maya in the form of sending her off to deliver a summons to her best friend for a chitchat had seemed like a good way to kill two birds with one admittedly unpolished stone. Maybe she couldn’t exactly spill the beans on their whole situation—though she had to admit it was kind of tempting now that they were alone—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t get creative and keep up with her subscription to the goings-on in Paula’s life.

“Well, as you hinted at earlier, you’re obviously aware that N— _Rebecca_ and I are, shall we say… involved,” she ventures. She carries on, emboldened by Paula’s exasperated but conceding nod. “So I’m trying to take an interest in her interests, if you will. And I know your friendship is very important to her.”

She can tell she’s almost already won by the way Paula straightens her shoulders and preens with a self-satisfied sort of pride. Knowing exactly which of her best friend’s buttons to push in order to get the reaction she wants is a tier of intimacy fraught with guilt, for Rebecca; though their relationship is for the most part unrivalled in its fondness and familiarity there’s always been something dark and dangerous for her in the prospect of getting to know another person. 

_All the better to manipulate you with,_ the big bad wolf inside her is all too keen to whisper in her ear, its sharp teeth glinting as the grin spreads wide. He’d been a close companion throughout her childhood, indispensable in dealing with her parents, and he’d been ready and waiting that day in the bathroom when she’d hidden, frightened and desperate, determined in her need to outsmart Trent.

She still hasn’t quite forgiven herself for unleashing him on Paula.

“How about I start? Hi. My name’s Nathaniel, native to California. Astrology is stupid and I’m a Slytherin.”

“You’re a what now?”

Rebecca rolls her eyes. “Harry Potter, Paula. God—don’t you have children?”

“Oh, _right_ ,” Paula says, eyes widening in recognition. “You and Rebecca have that whole weird wizard flirting thing going on. Yeah—Brendan and Tommy were never really into all that. And by ‘all that’ I mean books in general—sometimes I’m not convinced Tommy knows how to read.”

Exhaling on a laugh, Rebecca feels some of the tension go out of her shoulders. This is good—this is exactly what she needed.

“And your children, they’re well?” she presses, folding her hands in front of her on the desk as she leans forwards. “Aside from the illiteracy. No amusing anecdotes to share?”

“Well,” Paula begins, wry. “Neither of them have broken or stolen or set things on fire recently, but it is only Wednesday.”

Rebecca’s still in the midst of reaching for a reason to prolong the conversation when Paula’s phone chirrups, sending her friend squinting at the screen and twisting her wrist to look at the time.

“Listen, don’t get me wrong, this has been _super_ fun—a little Twilight Zone-y, but fun nonetheless—but I have somewhere else I need to be, right now, and—”

“Right! Right. You have lunch with the girls at Sugar Face,” Rebecca realises, tapping herself on the forehead. At Paula’s confused look she covers quickly, “Rebecca mentioned it this morning.”

Her heart sinks at the idea of her girls getting together without her, good mood dampened almost as quickly as it had bubbled up. Maybe she should un-cancel Nathaniel’s plans with Whijo, just for a change of scenery.

She briefly entertains her chances of convincing Nathaniel to bring her home a Boston cream.

“So we’re done here, right? I can go?” Paula prods, already half out of her chair. She points at Rebecca as she leaves. “Good chat, really. Let’s do it again sometime.”

The door swings shut with a click. 

“Guess it’s just you and me after all, Caesar,” Rebecca laments, and pops a half-soggy crouton into her mouth with a sigh.

* * *

So maybe things hadn’t gone exactly to plan, but he’d been quick on his feet, with this one, and as Nathaniel pulls out of the LA County Jail parking lot, he can’t help but feel more than a little chuffed.

A spanner had been thrown in the works of Nicky’s impending release in the form of an unpaid parking ticket, and suddenly what Rebecca had insisted would be an early morning walk in the park had turned into him defending his admittedly delicate grasp of local sanctions in an attempt to overturn the obscene escalation of her traffic violation during her absence owing to incarceration. There’d been something oddly exhilarating in it, having to rely on a combination of quick wits and determined creativity rather than going through the motions of something he’d argued so many times he practically knew it off by heart. He’d gotten the additional penalties thrown out, the whole thing reduced to the original fine that if she paid, she’d be free to go.

“I have a friend that’ll foot the cost on this one,” he’d assured Nicky sotto voce, and sending over the Plimpton-branded personal cheque had felt something like atonement.

Maybe there’d been something in Rebecca’s insistence that they treat this whole thing like a test after all, because for the first time since they found themselves in this sorry mess he feels like he’s winning, and he’s alight with a strange sense of competitive pride.

 

He’d had some time to kill before lunch that wasn’t worth heading back to the office so he spent the brunt of it holed up in Rebecca’s car, perusing the case notes for some of her other ex-cellmates and feeling a strange surge of energy in noting a possible new angle for Hanifa’s defence. His speciality, obviously, was real estate, not criminal justice—a shortcoming both he and Rebecca shared—but he also had contacts, and resources, and the thrill of a challenge had pulsed pleasantly in his chest. He could help her, the way he’d just helped Nicky. The way he’d failed to help Rebecca when she’d needed him most.

He’s still buzzed on the toasty-insides feeling when he makes it to Sugar Face fifteen minutes late, so caught up in his high that he almost doesn’t notice Paula trying to catch up to him in the parking lot. It takes her yelling _Cookie!_ at him three times before he catches on, finally connecting itto one of the eye roll-inducing pet names Rebecca had helpfully listed for him in the top right corner of her vastly unhelpful summary of her social circle.

“Hey, Cookie—Rebecca—slow down a second,” Paula calls out again, and he slows to a stop, pausing long enough to let her fall into step beside him.

“Sorry—I was daydreaming, I guess.”

“You look like you’re in a good mood,” Paula comments, nudging him with a smile. “I haven’t seen you yet this morning. Everything go alright at the jail?”

“Uh, not exactly,” he says, unable to fight the smugness that creeps into his tone. “But I handled it.”

“Well, look at you. That’s my girl.”

Heather and Valencia have already pulled up a table when he and Paula make it through the multicoloured beacon of the donut-shaped gate, the former sniffing suspiciously at a strand of her hair while the latter cups her hands around a mug and leans in close to her companion, whispering something she’s clearly not keen for anyone to overhear.

Nathaniel’s had his fair share of run-ins with Heather recently to have somewhat of a grasp on how to play it cool around her, and he’s worked alongside Paula long enough to do the same, but Valencia was still a terrifying wildcard as far as Rebecca’s friends were concerned. Something about the brunette’s commanding demeanour—the practiced, judgmental arch of her perfectly manicured brow—left him feeling disturbingly out of his depth.

“And what are you two lovely ladies gossiping about?” Paula asks, slinging her handbag onto the counter and pointing back and forth between them. “Did the Daily Covina run another pyramid scheme endorsement disguised as an expose on the cosmetic industry again? God, clickbait—so annoying, am I right?”

Evidently caught off-guard, Valencia straightens back up into her seat, unruffled. “We were starting to think you two weren’t going to show.”

“Sorry, I got held up at the jail,” he says.

“Yeah, and I got held up by your boyfriend wanting to hold hands and sing Kum Ba Ya,” Paula gripes, and he makes a mental note to ask Rebecca what the hell she’s been up to when he gets back.

Taking his cue from the others, Nathaniel joins them in their herd-like shuffle up towards the register to place their orders. His plan to pick the healthiest discernible option—a sickly looking, cinnamon-coated, off-puttingly porous gluten free number in the far left corner of the case—is thwarted by Paula’s disbelieving guffaw, leading to him blindly selecting something pink and busting at the seams with custard that he has to actively fight the urge to wrinkle his nose at when it’s handed to him on a serviette. 

“So,” Valencia begins once they’ve settled back in at their table, grasping the edge of the metal countertop and pitching forward conspiratorially, her voice unnaturally shrill. “We wanted to ease you into this but since you were late, as per usual,” she says, fixing Nathaniel with a pointed glare that makes him feel somehow even smaller than he already does inside Rebecca’s body, “and we’re all pressed for time, maybe it’s best if we just rip the bandaid off. ‘Kay? Kay.”

“Oh,” Paula says, raising her eyebrows. “Okay. Sounds serious.”

“It’s not,” Heather chimes in. “I mean, it’s _kind_ of a big deal, I guess, in the grand scheme of things? But like, nobody died, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“And we just want to state for the record that nobody is abandoning anybody, and that everyone involved is just trying to make normal, grown-up, ultimately positive life decisions for their own personal betterment in their journeys of self discovery,” Valencia adds, tossing her hair over her shoulder and jutting her chin in a show of confidence that rings entirely false in light of every other aspect of her body language.

Heather pulls a face and glances over to where Valencia’s wine-red nails are rapping nervously against the table. “Cool. Glad we cleared that up. So here’s the thing—Hector and I are moving out.”

It takes all three of their heads swivelling in his direction and fixing him with a cautious stare for Nathaniel to realise he’s the one that’s supposed to be responding.

“Oh,” he says after an awkward silence. “You are?”

Heather’s gaze slides carefully sidewise back and forth between Valencia and Paula. “Yeah. We’ve kind of been talking about it for awhile now, and since we’re married it seems like a good time. Plus we found a sweet condo in El Segundo in our price range and a going away party is, like, the perfect cover story for Hector’s surprise party slash wedding, so. Pros all round.”

“Right—the wedding,” Nathaniel says, snapping his fingers and perking up at the in he’s been offered. “While we’re on that topic, can I bring Nathaniel? We’re dating now. Again. Together.”

“Okay. I mean, sure. You can bring whoever you want. But I kind of thought there’d be a bit of discussion surrounding the whole moving out—”

“I’m moving too,” Valencia expels in a rush. “To New York. With Beth.”

Heather points in Valencia’s direction without looking at her. “Both of us. We’re both moving. It’s an unplanned coincidence. That we definitely have not been discussing behind your back for several weeks because we weren’t sure how you’d take it.”

They’re all staring at him again, and an icy trickle of dread in his stomach gives way to an overwhelming wave of nausea, chasing away every last flutter of warmth from his earlier victory at the jail along with it. He should never have agreed to doing this—Rebecca was _wrong_ , they hadn’t prepared for this at all.

When it becomes increasingly apparent it’s his turn to say something, he can’t help it; he panics, and shoves the entirety of the donut he’d only ordered for show right into his mouth.

“Oh, you’re—okay,” Heather says, recoiling a little.

Approximately half a second later he’s hit by two subsequent realisations—that he’s eventually going to have to deal with the aforementioned donut that is now vastly impeding not only his ability to talk but also to breathe, and also that _wow_ , Rebecca’s tastebuds really like donuts.

He half-heartedly works his jaw around the mass of dough and icing, fighting back the wince that originates because of an association Rebecca’s body doesn't share. It’s jarring, how the sickly, too-sweet feeling never comes, Rebecca’s stomach instead gurgling lightly in encouragement. For an insane moment he forgets what he’s been trying to buy time for, and when it comes back to him in an uneasy rush he gulps down some of the oversized mouthful and promptly spits out the rest back onto his napkin.

“Gross,” Heather grimaces.

“Wait—you’re leaving?” he says suddenly, turning back towards them, an irrational burst of anger bubbling up in him on Rebecca’s behalf. “Both of you? And you’re just saying something now? Rebecca _just_ started getting her life together.”

“She’s talking about herself in the third person,” Valencia hisses at Heather. “I told you this wouldn’t go down well.”

“You can’t both leave,” he insists. He reaches up to tug at a tie he isn’t wearing and ends up massaging the bare base of his throat instead. “If people are going to be leaving, it seems like there should be some kind of schedule, is what I’m saying. That maybe everybody should just take it in turns, instead of all at once.”

“I mean, it won’t be exactly at the same time. V agreed to help me move, so,” Heather says.

“Right,” Valencia agrees. “And I’ll be back for the holidays—I’ve already booked my ticket. And Rebecca, you know this doesn’t mean we’re not still going to be here for you, right? We can message, and FaceTime, and visit. My family’s still going to be here, and you have your mom in New York. I know we should have mentioned this to you sooner, but it’s honestly not that much of a big deal. It’s not like either of us were planning on taking off unannounced and never speaking to you again.”

Nathaniel can barely think over the way the blood is pounding confusingly in his ears, making him feel lightheaded. He’s so overwhelmed that he startles at the sensation of Paula’s hand on him, jerking when she starts massaging firm, soothing circles into his shoulder blade.

“Oh, hon. Sometimes people—they come and go. It doesn’t make your time together mean any less. You just have to treasure the moments you have.”

He pushes abruptly to his feet, pulling at the unbuttoned collar of his blouse that has nothing to do with the panicky way he feels like he can’t draw in the right amount of air. “I, uh… I have to go,” he says, fumbling to collect his belongings. 

He can’t get out of the donuteria fast enough.

* * *

By the time he makes it back to the office, Rebecca has already stepped out for her afternoon meeting, and i’s a welcome reprieve that he embraces gladly, sequestering himself in her office and brushing off Paula’s concern. 

“I’m fine, Paula. Really. I don’t want to talk about it right now,” he insists, “and I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on, after this morning, so if you don’t mind…”

She’d backed out with splayed palms, obedient but unconvinced.

Evidently being in Rebecca’s body has rubbed off on him because the second the clock ticks over to five he’s up and out the door, briefcase and handbag he hasn’t quite figured out the purpose of slung over his shoulder. 

He’s halfway home before he changes his mind and reroutes to Rebecca’s house, relieved to find the carport empty. More so than usual, he’s not in the mood to talk to anybody, and right now everyone in Rebecca’s immediate circle of friends—wisecracking housemate included—is high on his list of interactions he’d like to avoid.

For much of Nathaniel’s life he’s been raised to see people as business transactions; they were useful until they weren’t, they served a purpose and you kept them around just as long as they did. Happiness, or at least his version of it, was synonymous with success; something to aim for, to strive for—something you could win. West Covina had done a pretty good job of dismantling that notion for him so far, through sheer force of stubborn will more than anything, but the fact remained that it wasn’t in his nature to want to talk. Problems weren’t problems if you pretended they didn’t exist.

He opens Rebecca’s underwear drawer, fingers fisting in the fuchsia fabric of her sports bra—relieved to find it zips in the front—and searches through the others until he finds something that resembles what he’s seen women wear to the gym.

Because that’s just the kind of day he’s having, apparently, his win turns out to be short-lived when he’s caught off-guard by the sound of the front door opening before he can get there, pushing open to reveal Heather bending over the welcome mat, kicking off her shoes.

“Hey,” she says almost cautiously when she straightens up and sees him. “I thought you were crashing elsewhere for the week.”

She’s feeling awkward about earlier, obviously, which works just fine for him. It seems as good an excuse as any to cut their potential heart to heart short.

“I am,” he agrees. “I just came to get some workout clothes.”

Heather tilts her head at him. “Wait. You’re going to the gym? By yourself?”

He knows for a fact Rebecca intermittently attends a spin class, so he’d foolishly assumed he could make the admission without arousing suspicion. Unsure how he’s somehow still managed to tread incorrectly, he plucks at the stomach of his t-shirt by way of explanation. “Yeah. I’ve been feeling a little off, this week—a little bloated—and I haven’t been to a class in awhile, so I thought I’d go work off some tension.”

It’s not a complete lie. Since their ambush at the donut place his whole body feels kind of dull and heavy, even more disconnected than it has the past few days. An hour on the treadmill is exactly what he needs to clear his head and loosen up.

“Huh, okay. I mean sure, we all feel a little fat when we’re on our lunar calendar but you usually go the other way. Just like, a whole lot of ice cream and yelling.”

He scrunches up his face. “What?”

“Are you mad about earlier? Because you literally never go to the gym without dragging me or V along with you, and I know for a fact she’s at a wine mixer with Beth tonight,” Heather drawls, ignoring him. “And yeah, I probably should have mentioned Hector and I were looking at—”

“I’m not mad,” he cuts in, “I’m just… processing. But I’ve got to go if I’m going to make this class.”

Offering her a tight smile that she half-heartedly returns, eyes downcast as she twists her mouth, he grabs Rebecca’s keys off the counter and goes.

Sports bra or not, he knows better than to push Rebecca’s body past its limits, now. So thumbing through her playlists for something that isn’t Sondheim or Rogers and Hammerstein or the soundtrack to some insipid Disney cartoon he’s never seen, he forces himself to settle for some early 90s alternative rock and jams in her earbuds, setting the treadmill to one of the lower levels to ease her legs into the burn.

His elation from earlier doesn’t return no matter how he presses on, the uneasy queasiness squeezing in his stomach apparently here to stay. He manages to refocus some, though—schools his breathing, pushes the warring thoughts out of his mind and lightly jogs until his lungs catch fire and his vertically challenged calves start to ache from the stretch. 

By the time he gets back to his apartment his car is already in the building garage, signalling Rebecca has beaten him home, just as he expected. It only takes her a moment to swing open the door when he knocks.

“Hey,” she says, drawing out the word, smiling down at him. “How was your day?”

* * *

“Gross, why are you all sweaty?” she asks, wrinkling her nose as he brushes past her.

“I’ve been at the gym. Turns out your body sweats a lot when you try to make it do things.”

“Mm, yeah,” she says with sympathy. “Let me know if you figure out how to switch that off.”

He’d decided against showering when he’d hesitated too long in the doorway to the locker room, feeling like too much of an imposter to step inside. He can only imagine what that’s left him looking—and _smelling_ —like. As it is he’s keenly aware of the way the stray hairs at his nape are plastered to his neck with dried sweat.

“Speaking of,” Rebecca continues, brimming with more energy than he’s seen from her in the past few days, “while I was waiting for you to come home I’ve been indulging in a little physical exertion of my own.”

He raises his eyebrows at her, not entirely sure he wants to know.

“Nothing untoward,” she says quickly. “Just… testing out my new upgrades. Look at this—I can reach all your cupboards now.”

True to her word she all but skips past the bathroom door to run her fingers along the uppermost panels of his closet, trailing a self-satisfied line from edge-to-edge until she reaches the wall, at which point she stoops to grip the armchair next to his bed and hoist it up off the ground.

Her unchecked enthusiasm is contagious, and he finds himself smiling despite himself.

“ _And_ I can lift things now.” She drops the chair back into place with an unforgiving thud against his tile that makes him cringe, folding her arm into an exaggerated approximation of a bicep curl. “Oh man, lifting things is fun. I wanna lift more things. Maybe I should go to the gym after all, just to flex my sweet new guns.” 

“You realise it’s not just about muscle mass, right? There’s a technique, and if you throw out my back—”

“Keep complaining, buddy, and I’m signing this sweet ass up to Zumba. Oh yeah. Might even invite Darryl. And there will be photographic evidence on _all_ of their social media accounts.” She wipes her hands on the thighs of her sweats to rid them of residual dust. “How was the bra, by the way?”

Nathaniel gives himself an experimental squeeze. They’re definitely still tender, but it’s not the same agonising ache as last time. “Better,” he says. “Thank you.”

She hums her assent. “So while I was waiting for you to come home, I may have also compulsively cleaned your kitchen—not that it was dirty, or anything, it’s kind of just a thing I sometimes do while I’m blasting music and thinking deep thoughts about my life—and I found all these takeaway menus on top of your fridge.”

It’s not an accusation; she’s holding them fanned out in front of her as if they’re buried treasure. 

He remembers exactly where they came from, and knows Rebecca must remember too. That she’d been the one to collect them from the stand downstairs in the lobby, and that he’d groaned and rolled away from her as she’d spread them out across his bed for her perusal, wrapped in nothing but his sheets. He has to blink hard to dispel the image of her—reconcile it with where she is now, in his body, those same lightly creased menu clutched in her giant hands.

She taps them against her face, oblivious to the way he’s found himself rooted to the spot. “I don’t know about you, but I could eat. I thought we could order up a five course banquet, kick back and talk scheduling conflicts. How does that sound?”

“Sounds expensive,” he quips, proud of the way his voice doesn’t crack at all.

Rebecca bites her lip and fishes in her back pocket, and two seconds later she’s flashing his credit card at him. 

That gets his attention. “Don’t you dare,” he says, making a lunge for it.

“Nuh-uh-uh,” she says, jerking it away and exuding an entirely too-pleased sense of victory when she’s able to easily dangle it out of his reach. “You wouldn’t want to commit fraud, now, would you?”

He shoots her a look he hopes conveys exactly what he thinks of that brand of logic.

“Anyway, I’m only kidding. Kind of. But I have an idea.”

“Always worrisome.”

“We should order for each other,” she says, ignoring him, extending the menus to him like an olive branch. 

He scoffs. “What, so we can torture each other some more?”

“No, think about it—we know what we like, but right now we’re not ourselves. So if we order for each other, then we’re each going to get something our mouths are gonna love.”

He thinks back to earlier in the day, the way the pink icing from the donut had felt like it was exploding in his mouth. What she’s saying makes sense, and it’s a nice gesture, it really is. It’s just—

“What you have to understand, Rebecca, is that I don’t have the same relationship with food that you do. I don’t eat things because I like them. I eat them because my body requires sustenance. That’s it.”

He understands indulgence, obviously—he’d gorged himself on his fair share of pizzas and fries in his post-dumping spiral. But none of that ever made him _feel good_ ; when he overloaded on fast foods it was because he wanted to punish himself, because he felt miserable and knew exactly how to make it worse. 

“Okay, well, sad,” Rebecca says, frowning. “But fine. Maybe I miss out on the carefully curated mouthgasm this time around. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do it for you.”

There’s something so disgustingly earnest shining in her eyes that’s so undeniably Rebecca it hits him right in the gut, and he’s sighing his resignation before he can think any better of it.

“Fine,” he says, “but I draw the line at dessert. You want all that treadmill time to be for nothing?” 

“Aww, look at you, looking out for my butt,” she coos at him, and he yelps when she proceeds to lean over and use the menu to slap him on the ass. 

* * *

“Maybe we’ll be stuck like this for ever,” she muses out loud. “Then I’ll have to move in with you permanently. A marriage of convenience.”

Nathaniel feels an unidentifiable twinge at that. “Is that what happens in that movie of yours?”

“Freaky Friday? Ha, no. It’s a mother-daughter switch, no fake romantic entanglement required. Although,” she says, squinting over at him, “there _is_ this whole thing where Lindsay Lohan’s character agrees to marry her mom’s boyfriend, which is ultimately part of what switches them back. So maybe I… need to let you marry my mom?”

“You realise it would be you doing the marrying, though.”

“But then once we switch back, she’s all yours, so. Mazel.” She shifts onto her side, the leather creaking its protest, and when she speaks again it’s almost directly in his ear. “If we do end up stuck like this forever, at what point do we just… stop being ourselves and start being each other?”

He both doesn’t want to and can’t stop thinking about that, but he can’t bring himself to admit it. Not when she’s so close. 

Instead he ends up blurting out, “Have you ever lived on your own before?” 

He’s sitting on the floor, leaning back against the couch Rebecca’s unabashedly taking up in its entirety, his legs straight out in front of him while hers curl over the arm of the chair. They’ve been lounging like this for awhile now, waiting for their food, and though the intention had been to discuss their game plan for the next day they’d yet to make it that far, descending instead into meaningless chatter that was somehow now edging into the philosophical.

Apparently his near-non sequitur is acceptable enough for her to indulge, though, because she takes his change of topic right in stride, humming in consideration. “Yeah, for awhile when I first got here, but then I kinda set my house on fire?” She rolls over onto her stomach, plucking at the couch cushion and kicking up her legs in a whimsical way that looks all wrong on Nathaniel’s body. “I mean, I lived on my own in New York, too. Big, ugly, empty apartment. But I worked a lot, so I was never really there, you know? Not to mention I was so numbed out on medication…”

“Sorry—I thought I just heard you say you worked a lot,” Nathaniel says, cocking his head.

Rebecca pokes out her tongue. “It’s nice, having a housemate,” she says. “Heather and I drive each other crazy sometimes, but it’s just so comforting to know that even if you’re in completely different rooms and don’t say much to each other the entire day, you’re not alone, you know? And let’s be honest, I need the reality check sometimes.”

Her easy smile, unnatural to him on his own face, summons up the guilt again, pulsing unpleasantly in his stomach.

“What about you, Mr Lone Wolf?” she teases, bumping him in the shoulder. “Any memorable roomies?”

“Ha. Well. Aside from college, I’ve never really properly lived with anyone before,” he says reluctantly. “Nothing official, anyway.”

There’s an uncomfortable silence where they both know he’s thinking of Mona.

There’d been something oddly detached in the idea of Mona moving in with him—it had been all at once a peace offering, a bargaining chip, a logical next step. A way to trick himself into believing he could get over Rebecca if he just did everything right, as if Mona moving in was the exact same thing as moving on.

Rebecca had never lived with him, per se—unless you counted the two week stretch where she all but set up camp between his sheets—but he still felt her presence everywhere, littered through his life like the scattered clothing she’d had a penchant for leaving strewn across his floor. She had an uncanny way of taking up space, like a barreling ball of helium gas that dispersed through his thoughts, his apartment, his entire world; always expanding outwards to occupy up the entirety of whatever container he tried to place her in, simultaneously insuppressible and under pressure, comprised of the stuff that could synthesise stars.

He’s always been on some sub-atomic level aware of it—the way she lives her life in desperate little fires everywhere, like if she sets enough of them burning, maybe she’ll be impossible to put out.

“Well,” she says, clearing her throat and sitting up. “My commiserations to whomever eventually has to put up with your five thirty alarms for the rest of their lives. Because I did two weeks of it, and it was _brutal._ ”

He knows the smile he gives her doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Hey,” he says quietly, gaze sliding back up from where it’s dropped down to her mouth. “There’s something I need to—“

He’s cut off by a loud knocking at the door, making them both jump.

“Hold that thought, because dinner’s here,” Rebecca sing-songs, scrambling up off the floor to look for his wallet.

Letting out a heavy breath, he pushes himself to his feet and busies himself with finding them dinnerware, neatly stacking away the papers they’d left spread across the table the night before and setting out cutlery, preparing the space for them to eat. By the time Rebecca comes back with the food he’s lost his nerve entirely, intent instead on unpacking the excessively thorough spread she’s taken it upon herself to order.

When she sits back down beside him it’s even closer than she was before, her warm hip butting up against his.

“Hey… this is kind of nice, right?” she says, giving him a nudge. “I guess I forgot that we had other stuff in common. Outside of, you know. All the sex.”

He throws her a half-smile because for him it isn’t true; he’s always been on some level aware of how pathetic it is, his pervasive need to seek her company. The way he’d happily used eight months locked in a supply closet as a placeholder for all the things he wished he could give up wanting with her, like games of Boggle and Sunday mornings spent in bed.

He’s always, _always_ thought they’ve made a good team.

“Hey, what were you about to say earlier? Before the food arrived?”

He opens his mouth to respond, but the brief surge of confidence he’d felt doesn’t return; before he can fumble his way through an explanation she cuts him off again, making a noise around her packed cheeks, slinging out an arm to whack him exuberantly in the shoulder. 

She gulps down hard on her noodles. “How was lunch? Did you secretly love it? Did you enjoy being an honorary member of the hashtag gurl group for evah? Also—what donut did you order and was it amazing and are you now converted to donuts? Tell me everything.”

He lets out a shaky laugh. “I, uh… Well…”

“Let me guess—you tried to order the plainest donut there, no sprinkles, but then Paula looked at you like you’d grown three heads and you panic upgraded to chocolate.”

“Strawberry, actually,” he corrects. “If I’m going to poison myself with artificial flavouring I’m at least going to go with the one that most closely resembles a fruit.”

Rebecca laughs as she pries the lid off a takeaway container and it occurs to him this is most relaxed he’s seen her since they switched places, the lighthearted looseness all out of place on his frame. He can’t tell her. Not now, not when she’s just getting settled.

When she eagerly nudges a red box in his direction he accepts it with trepidation, flipping open the lid to stare at the monstrosity she’s ordered for him that’s waiting inside.

“I can hear you counting the calories in my head,” Rebecca says. “Stop it, and just take a bite already. It’s not your body ingesting them anyway, so no harm, no foul.”

“If you keep watching me like that, I’m not going to eat anything,” he tells her, and waits until she begrudgingly rolls her eyes away from him to lift the burger to his mouth.

He forces himself to stop thinking about the gluten and the dairy involved, about the no doubt astronomical carb count and percentage of his daily recommended fat intake. If Rebecca’s happy to clog her own arteries in the name of the knowledge that he’d in some capacity eaten a pile of grease in a yellow paper wrapper, who has he ever been to deny her something she wants?

The first bite he takes is small, comprised predominantly of the meat and cheese practically bursting out the side. It tastes… colourful, is interestingly the adjective that springs to mind—rich and flavoursome and kind of heavy, like it’s going to sit in his stomach for a long time, keeping him warm and full. He ventures another nibble, and when he catches Rebecca peeking at him again she darts her eyes away hastily, not quite quick enough to smother her delighted smile.

He takes a bigger bite, this time—takes in the crunch of the lettuce and light spice of the sauce.

“Well, while you were off having fun with comfort carbs and my friends,” she says, still forgoing the plate he gave her entirely and scooping straight out of the tub, “I managed to convince the judge to grant a stay on the Okely case—you’re welcome, by the way. And I received a call from your father’s secretary wanting to set up a lunch for Friday. Looks like it’s my turn to indulge a little courtesy of the company expense account.”

“What?” he asks sharply. “You said yes?”

“I know we’ve got that hearing in the morning and Heather’s wedding in the afternoon but I figured it’s just lunch, right? In Plimpton speak that’s what, forty minutes at best? I can squeeze it in.”

The change in his mood is immediate, burger dropped back down to the coffee table, forgotten. “No. Cancel it. Call back tomorrow and tell him you’re busy.”

“What? No, c’mon, it’ll be fine. Let me do this for you. I still feel like I owe you, since that time you flew in my dad, and that whole thing where I got a little too obsess-y and insisted you had a secret sibling. This is the perfect way for me to make it up to you. You know how good I am at charming rich old white men—I’ll have him warming up to you in no time.”

He bites back the venom that forms the outline of the words in his mouth that are regrettably in the shape of _I also know a little about your track record with fathers._ Forcing himself to tamp down on his knee-jerk inclination towards pettiness, he bites out instead, “Rebecca, I’m not joking with you—cancel the lunch. It’s not happening.”

“Fine,” she says, frowning. “There’s no need to be such a grump about it. I just wanted to help.”

“I don’t need your help,” he snaps, standing abruptly. “Certainly not with my father, and not with anything else, for that matter. You’ve done more than enough, believe me.”

He stalks out towards the kitchen and presses the heels of his hands hard into the sockets of his skull to try to wrestle away the image that for a moment when he’d looked at her, it had been her eyes and not his—wide with surprise and hurt—staring forlornly back at him.

* * *

“I apologise for the way I spoke to you earlier. That was uncalled for.”

Rebecca deliberately takes her time sliding her gaze up from the magazine she’s reading up to his face. _Her_ face, if she’s being technical, and she realises suddenly that she’s staring down the barrel of what so many of her friends must be used to seeing play out before them like a broken record on apologetic rinse and repeat—Rebecca Bunch in full regret mode, dripping with self-loathing and chagrin.

Nathaniel’s a lot more accustomed to keeping a cap on it, of course, but he’s still currently stuck in her body, forced to communicate via a system all too prone to glitching and running haywire, telegraphing its every emotion as if unintentionally connected to an oversized projection screen.

“Yeah, dude,” she agrees. “It kinda was.”

He raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “My father is obviously a tetchy subject for me, and I’m sorry for snapping at you. But I would appreciate it if you would cancel the lunch.” He takes a deep breath, then exhales hard. “My father doesn’t respond well to me behaving anything but a certain way. I just don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

She gets it, she does—gets the trickle of fear that still ices over her spine sometimes at the thought of her mother surveying her and inevitably ruling that she doesn’t measure up. Had felt it, even, at the idea of Nathaniel speaking to her on the phone. Understanding his reluctance to let her interact with his equally judgmental father isn’t any semblance of a stretch.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll call his secretary back tomorrow.”

“Thank you.”

She’d migrated to the mattress after his outburst, spiteful in her satisfaction that he had always hated her penchant for eating in bed. It had been hard for him, even in those meagre weeks when they’d barely progressed past unofficial, to surrender to the chaos of someone else inhabiting his space; someone with an almost blatant disregard for his rules and personal preferences, at that. She can’t help but think back to their conversation earlier about co-habitation and feels an uninvited pang knowing he must have been thinking of Mona. Wonders if her edges had fit a little neater alongside his. Wonders if he’d go back, if he could, and stay, instead of running to her rescue that night at the police station. Knowing now how it was all for nothing.

He clears his throat and gestures to the table. “After I clear this up, maybe we should talk about how we’re going to handle your therapy session tomorrow. Something tells me I’m going to need something more than a crumpled piece of paper to see me through it.”

“C’mon, are you trying to say my cheat sheet didn’t come in handy at all?” she teases, and she’s pretty sure she sees his shoulders sag in relief at her light tone.

“For some reason all I could remember were the names and ages of Paula’s children—which of course never came up, by the way—everything else slid out of my brain the minute I sat down.”

She grins. “I told you we should’ve made flash cards.”

She tries to turn her attention back to her magazine but finds her gaze drawn to him as he gathers up the remnants of their aborted shared dinner, not missing the way he lingers on his barely-touched burger before gingerly scraping it into the trash. 

“You still hungry?” she asks, indicating one of the containers next to her. “Chicken cashew fairs infinitely better in the microwave than soggy burger, I’m sure.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“Hmm, well—your loss.”

When he reemerges from the kitchen in the wake of discarding their dishes, he’s carrying a stack of envelopes secured with an elastic band. “Heather dropped off some of your mail at lunch,” he says, tossing them at her feet on the end of the bed. “Said she wasn’t sure when you were planning on crawling out of your—and I quote—‘sex cocoon’, and thought some of it looked important.”

“Mmm, well,” Rebecca says around an oversized mouthful of pad Thai, wriggling forward on the mattress to get at them, “if the food inside my sex cocoon is going to continue to taste this amazing, possibly never. You were wrong, before, by the way—your stomach likes stuff. God, I forgot how good it was being around the corner from this place. You should definitely list that perk on your dating profile on Tinder or Bumble or WASP-Wants-A-Wife dot-com, right underneath ‘private jet’ and ‘must love fish’.”

He only rolls his eyes at her in response. “I’m going to take a long overdue shower while you work on the Cliff Notes version of your troubled childhood. You better not be getting crumbs in my sheets.”

She waves him off, reaching forward to pick up the stack of mail and idly leafing through the pile. When she reaches the envelope she realises Heather must have flagged, her stomach lurches unexpectedly and she sits up straight in the bed.

Her thumb creeps over to the crisp white corner to cover up where the seal of the State Bar of California has been emblazoned, confused by the way her throat feels like it’s shrunk down to a fifth of its usual size.

The sound of the water shutting off in the bathroom eventually compels her back into motion, sending her shaking her head in an attempt to physically dispel the sensation that she’s trapped underwater, with the entire weight of the ocean beating down against her chest.

She scrunches the envelope in half without opening it, yanks out Nathaniel’s bedside drawer and hastily stuffs it as far back as she can reach.


	6. our bodies, possessed by light

He wakes with his nose pressed into what soon turns out to be Rebecca’s spine.

When he manages to pull himself somewhat upright, he surveys their sleeping arrangements with bleary-eyed confusion; Rebecca’s half hanging off the edge of the bed, her main point of anchorage the fingers of her right hand that have curled around one of the slats in his bedhead just above her head in some sort of sleepwalk self-preservation mechanism, he’s sure. The other arm dangles off the side of the mattress like a dead weight.

Nathaniel’s managed to fair much better—comfortably situated in the centre, in no danger of rolling off—but his cramped posture still leaves a lot to be desired, curled as he is in a tight ball around his pillow, butting up snug against the small of Rebecca’s back. Grunting his discomfort, he stretches and unfurls himself, joints popping audibly as he goes.

Rebecca begins to stir, tipping perilously closer to her doom, and his arm flings out on autopilot to grab her by the waistband of her underwear, tugging until she twists obediently back towards him, yawning. After a moment she cracks an eyelid, blinks sleepily at him and hums.

She seems to notice the precariousness of her position because she wriggles herself forwards by her hips until she’s all but pressed up against him. 

“Bed hog,” she tells him, eyes drooping closed.

“Wonder where I got that from,” he shoots back.

They’ve been afforded somewhat of a sleep-in by Rebecca’s 9am appointment with her therapist, and he takes her lead in letting himself doze. By the time the alarm eventually goes off, Rebecca’s already holding his phone; he jerks awake to her quickly shutting off the ringtone, his forehead tipped drowsily down into her shoulder.

He forces himself to re-stretch and reclaim some space, and Rebecca kicks him in the calf as he goes.

“So. Therapy,” he says, dragging himself up against the headboard. He can’t talk to her while they’re laying down, sharing sheets, voices still rough with sleep. It’s too domestic, too intimate. Too much like something they might have done before. “What’s our actual plan of attack?”

They’d spent the evening covering all the relevant buzz topics—abandonment issues, her dad, the ABCs of BPD—and he knows the conversation hadn’t been kind on her. She’d been subdued, afterwards, and her dampened mood had transferred to him via some kind of emotional osmosis; with every dark piece of herself she’d revealed he’d felt himself growing heavier, wishing so much there was something of himself he could offer her back in return.

There was a lot they had in common, it turned out—particularly the more oedipal aspects of their parental resentment—but it’s never been in his nature to share. 

Rebecca pulls herself upright and drags a hand through the unkempt crest of her hair and down her face, palm lingering to cup the scratchy surface of her jaw. 

“Like I said,” she says, an almost devious smile twitching on her lips, “I have an idea. But Dr Akopian’s definitely going to hate it.”

* * *

“And remember, if you get stuck, just… say something about her necklace.”

Nathaniel nods his shaky assent and Rebecca tugs down on the lapels of her jacket, rolling her shoulders in a display of confidence she hopes will manifest itself in actuality as they brace themselves to face her therapist. 

“You want to bring Nathaniel in for a couple’s therapy session,” Dr Akopian repeats once Nathaniel’s dutifully rattled off the proposal she’d scripted, the psychiatrist’s face predictably skeptical.

“Not exactly,” Nathaniel says, shaking his head. “Because we’re not technically a couple.”

“More like _ex_ couple’s therapy,” Rebecca suggests. “Two people who used to bone… a _lot_ … looking to reconnect. A potential ex-ex-couple, if you will. Just wanting to… work through all those loose ends.”

Dr Akopian sighs, clearly unimpressed with the ambush. “Rebecca, this is highly irregular. Perhaps if you’d raised this request in advance—”

“I’ll pay double,” Nathaniel says. “Triple, even. Completely upfront.”

Rebecca can practically see the cartoon kayak fade into a cloud-shaped bubble over Dr Akopian’s head as the other woman relents, plastering an indulgent smile across her face.

“Well then. Nathaniel. Why don’t we all take a seat?”

* * *

“So,” Dr Akopian begins, sinking back into her armchair to regard the both of them, awkwardly positioned apart on the couch. “Now that we’re settled into our first—and frankly unorthodox—joint session, why don’t we start by discussing what it is you’re hoping to get out of this?”

“Clearing the air,” Rebecca supplies. “Rebecca and I have had somewhat of a rocky past, and there’s a couple of elephants in the room we feel need addressing because we can move on to the next stage in our relationship. Because burying issues isn’t healthy.”

“Okay,” Dr Akopian agrees. “Rebecca—since this is still technically your session, what about you? What do you hope to achieve today?”

Nathaniel swivels his gaze away from gaping at the melting pot of ethnic decor filling the room to blink at her. “I, uh… what he said,” he says, pointing sideways at Rebecca. “About the elephants. And the air clearing.”

“I’m also new to the whole therapy thing,” Rebecca adds, “so if you could just, like, take it super easy, explain things nice and slow, and not expect any heavy lifting today, that would be great. We were thinking some light, breezy role play, to really get inside each other’s heads. That’s the whole couple’s counselling schtick, right? Getting inside each other’s heads?”

“We can take things slow,” Dr Akopian concedes. “But Nathaniel, therapy can be an imprecise and tricky process. Ultimately it will be most beneficial to you to keep an open mind about the approach we take here.” She shifts in her chair, flipping back through her pages of notes before setting her pad down in her lap and looking back up at them, hands folded. “If we’re going to be wrangling elephants today, why don’t we start with the most obvious one?”

“My weird obsession with plaid?” Rebecca offers meekly.

The psychiatrist’s answering smile is patient—vaguely exasperated, but fond—as she shakes her head in the negative. 

“What do you think made the two of you decide to have an affair?”

* * *

“I didn’t want to have an affair with you,” Nathaniel says, incredulous. “I just wanted to _be_ with you. How can you still not understand that? All I’ve ever wanted was to be with you, and that’s not a thing that I’ve ever wanted before, okay? That’s how I know.”

Rebecca growls. “I can’t keep having this fight with you. Look, I know that feeling something for the first time is easy to mistake for thinking you’re never going to feel that way again. I get it. I do. I know what it feels like to be so sure you’re meant to be with someone it hurts sometimes, but that feeling isn’t real.”

“Stop it,” he says. “Stop… using your therapy like this weapon that you think gives you a right to twist things around and tell me what I mean.”

“Let’s just hold it there, shall we,” Dr Akopian says loudly, leaning forward and holding up her hands in a cautious _halt_ motion. 

It’s commanding enough to jolt Rebecca back into self-awareness, the reality of how quickly they’d let themselves get carried away—with little concern for their cover—washing over her like ice water. This was a terrible idea, she realises far too late. Because contriving an excuse to be themselves for an hour was all well and good until you took into account the very real wealth of baggage they carried between them, apparently only begging for an opportunity to be opened up.

“This is quite the impressive commitment to the bit,” Dr Akopian continues, eyebrows raised. “Some might even say slightly _too_ committed—usually role play is more of a structured exercise—but let’s just take a moment and take a breath, shall we, hmm?” She waits for them to comply, begrudgingly exhaling in unison. “I’d like to pause to unpack some of what was just raised here. Rebecca—is it a concern of yours that you’ve been using what you’ve learned here as a tool to manipulate others? Or is this a criticism that has been voiced against you, perhaps?”

Nathaniel flounders, equally caught off-guard by their derailment. “Sometimes,” he says, speaking slowly, “I feel like Nathaniel thinks that I invalidate his feelings.”

“Nathaniel, do you have anything you’d like to say to Rebecca in response to that assumption?”

Rebecca twists to face him on the couch, smoothing out the fabric of her trousers. “Okay, well—yeah. Fine. I do. I do feel that. But I also think that you think that I… lack the emotional intelligence to comprehend what I—or you—are feeling most of the time.”

“Okay,” Nathaniel says hesitantly. “But maybe you’re just feeling confused, because you thought we were happy, and that we loved each other, and could finally be together, and y… I… keep deciding otherwise, and it’s like you don’t even have a say in the matter. And everything always has to be on my terms.”

“If I could interject again for a second,” Dr Akopian interrupts. “Empathy is important, yes—but it might be more helpful to refocus on your own feelings, rather than projecting feelings onto the other party.”

Rebecca ignores her, crossing her arms in a flare of irritation. “Well maybe you’re going through some stuff and I’m just too much of an egotistical, emotionally stunted _man_ to wrap my head around it,” she retorts.

“Self flagellation is not productive, Nathaniel,” Dr Akopian warns, but neither of them pay her any mind.

“Well, sorry that maybe I just like to use ‘what I’m going through’ as a blanket excuse to tap out of this every time it gets a little bit hard,” Nathaniel snaps, and Rebecca has to squeeze her hands into fists in her lap to stop herself from slapping him.

Her blood starts pounding furiously in her ears, both in outrage at what he’s said and the beginnings of the sting that on some level it’s ultimately true. She’s always, _always_ struggled to even begin to untangle the mess of the way she feels about him, and denial has always been her strong suit.

She scrunches her eyes shut, taking a deep, steadying breath. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, then forces herself to open them again and look at him. “I’m sorry. This is… a lot.”

Sensing the lull in their verbal barrage, Dr Akopian leans forward, evidently eager to reclaim the reins.

“We don’t have a lot of time left,” she says, her relief at that fact more than apparent. “But Nathaniel has, perhaps unwittingly, brought us around to another exercise I’d like to try. Good communication is paramount in any healthy relationship, and you’ve both voiced a lot of concerns today that I think it’s beneficial to have raised. One of the goals the two of you expressed at the start of this session was ‘clearing the air’, and I’m sensing a lot of regret over misunderstandings past actions have caused. Is there anything either of you would like to apologise for, now that we’ve aired some grievances?”

Rebecca opens her mouth, contrite, fully prepared to start them off, but Nathaniel shifts restlessly beside her and beats her to it.

“I apologise for begging you not to break up with me, then just turning around and doing it myself anyway.”

She scoffs. “I apologise for firing you, because god forbid I let professionalism get in the way of my wounded pride.”

The space between them on the couch has become nearly negligible, now; each of them orienting themselves towards the source of their agitation as if compelled by an irresistible magnetic pull. Rebecca can’t help but admire the appeal in the way the haughtiness presents itself on her body—the almost comically heaving bosom, the narrowed eyes, the dramatic jaunt of her tipped chin. Every inch of her insignificant frame is practically vibrating with indignation, and she can’t bring herself to look away.

“I apologise for turning up on your doorstep the other night just to screw you and leave,” Nathaniel says, voice low, eyes accusing but also hurt.

Her breath bounces back off his face in an angry puff. “Well, I apologise for propositioning you for sex in the company elevator when I knew you were engaged that one time.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Then I apologise for coming to your apartment in the middle of the night wearing nothing but a trench coat, trying to trade sex for favours.”

“It wasn’t just a trench coat, okay,” Rebecca sneers, finally whirling away from him to clarify to Dr Akopian’s bemused expression, “She was wearing lingerie underneath. Very tasteful lingerie, might I add, that she spent a lot of money on. Also, I wasn’t complaining. At any point. At all.”

Dr Akopian’s eyes flutter closed for a moment. “This wasn’t exactly what I—”

“I’m sorry for throwing our entire plan out the window when you were trying to stop me from being sent to jail,” Nathaniel barrels on, tone unmistakably bitter now, his every word working its way in to stab her in the gut.

 _Fine,_ Rebecca thinks furiously, as the feeling of betrayal ferments. _Two can play at that game_. 

“I’m sorry for waiting two fucking weeks after our relationship was in the ground before finding someone else.”

She surprises herself, with the venom coating every word that spits out of her mouth, the thought itself not fully formed until it leaves her. 

“Mona,” Nathaniel says flatly after a stunned pause. “You’re sorry for Mona. You’re bringing her into this? Really? Okay. Fine. Let’s talk about Mona.”

“I’m just saying, maybe a part of you still hasn’t forgiven me for moving on with her in the first place, because deep down, you wanted me to wait for you, and _that’s_ why you still feel like you can’t trust me to understand what you’re going through,” she says, and the room quickly settles into an uneasy silence.

It’s not something she’s ever verbalised or even consciously considered before, but the way her stomach squeezes in vindication when she speaks it tells her that it’s true. There’s a wave of guilt that immediately chases the admission, knowing on some level how deeply unfair it is of her to have expected anything from him, when she was the one that had let him go. But her heart _aches_ with the memory of seeing them together—splashed across her screens on his social media, at Raging Waters, holding hands as they entered the baby shower—and the residual yearning of how much she’d wanted that to have been possible for them tightens in her throat.

“What?” he asks, soft. “Is that true?” When she blinks at him he checks himself and stammers, “I mean, wow. Okay. I guess that could be true. Maybe. I… I, uh…” He coughs, his words coming out garbled, like they’re too dry for his mouth. “I’m sorry, my throat feels really tight—”

He turns away from her, hands wringing in his lap. But there’s a pink rising in his cheeks and the way he tips his head heavenward gives her pause.

“Are you… are you crying, right now?” Rebecca asks in disbelief.

“Nathaniel,” Dr Akopian chides. “This room is a safe space, where exploring difficult emotions is encouraged.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Rebecca says dismissively, shaking her head. “Sorry. I… recognise and acknowledge your emotions, yada yada, carry on.”

She continues to gape at him as he grits his teeth against the tremble in his lips, the pinpricking of tears welling in his eyes glinting in the sidelight coming in from the window. She’s not entirely sure what _he_ has to be crying about, currently, but she’s so taken aback by the sight of it that all the resentment deflates slowly out of her, leaving her feeling exhausted and drained.

Nathaniel snatches a Kleenex from the coffee table, sniffing loudly. “Would I maybe be able to get that prescription now?” he asks as he scrubs the tissue across the underside of his nose. “Because I think we’re done here. And also? For the record? Your necklace is _very_ chunky.”

Dr Akopian buries her head in her hands.

* * *

“Dude, what’s with the water works?” Rebecca asks once they’re headed to the car, Nathaniel still swiping irritatedly at his damp cheeks.

He bristles, embarrassed, and stuffs the damp, snotty tissue into the pocket of his jeans. He’s still feeling distractingly off-kilter, between the arguing and the emotions and the salty tears that are burning at the back of his throat, and Rebecca’s needling is only making him all the more more defensive.

“I don’t know!” he says, gesturing at his face. “It’s your stupid body and your stupid, weak, woman tear ducts. All I know is you started saying those things back there and my chest got all prickly and my throat closed up and then this was happening. And as for these,” he adds, clutching at his breasts, “how do you even function, with the way they’re just so sensitive and sore all the time? And you have to stop wearing so much cologne, because every time I smell it, now, I break out in goosebumps, which is absurd and embarrassing, because I don't even _believe_ in goosebumps.”

Recognition blossoms on her face and she laughs. “Sounds to me like you’re just super hormonal and horny because…” She trails off, eyes going wide as she claps a hand over her mouth to stifle the fully blown cackle that threatens to spill out of her. “Oh my god,” she wheezes. “You’re PMS-ing. This is… incredible. Oh my god. This entire experience is now worth it.”

He’d wanted to go back, wanted to ask her if it was really true—what she said about Mona—but his mind quickly becomes preoccupied with a very different kind of discomfort. 

Rebecca can barely climb into the passenger seat, she’s so hysterical, and Nathaniel’s still feeling faint so between the two of them they kind of just end up sitting in the car for a bizarre stretch of minutes, trying to breathe.

“Is Nathaniel feeling achey?” she ventures once she’s apparently composed herself, the baby voice as filtered through his larynx somehow even more cringe-inducing than usual. “Does he need a back rub?”

He irritably shrugs her hand off his shoulder. “Do not touch me.”

“I mean, you already gave me a reach-around in the office bathroom, so. What’s a little platonic shoulder massage between two body swapped friends with a complicated romantic history? Huh? Huh?” She nudges her shoulder against his then reaches over to pat him on the leg. “Honestly, though—you’ve still got a couple of days’ leeway, and while I feel it’s my duty as a feminist to be actively rooting for you to experience the joys of womanhood, maybe let’s just cross that bridge if and when we come to it, hmm?”

He grunts as he puts the car into reverse.

* * *

“Honey, I’m home,” Rebecca sing-songs as she lets herself into Nathaniel’s apartment.

She’s still endlessly entertained by how easily Mr Perfect never-had-a-sick-day-in-his-life Plimpton caved to playing hooky at the mere prospect of having to deal with a little menstrual blood and, if she’s honest, grateful for the reprieve the distraction has offered them from their train wreck of a therapy session. There’s still a pang in the hollow of her chest that pulses uncomfortably when she looks at him, but she pushes it down, tucks it away—they’ve done enough dredging through the past for one day, she’s decided. 

“Just leave me alone,” Nathaniel grumbles, slouching back against the armrest of his couch and hugging a cushion to his chest.

“Hmm, nope—I come bearing gifts and I think you’re going to be interested in the wisdom I have to impart.”

She’s got a block of chocolate—dark, in an attempt to better pander to his sensibilities—in one hand and a bottle of red wine gripped firmly in the other, and she tilts them enticingly in his direction.

“I don’t eat chocolate,” he says automatically.

“Wrong,” she says. “ _I_ don’t eat chocolate. Because I’m you, and your life is devoid of joy and happiness. This finely oiled machine, on the other hand,” she says, indicating the length of him sprawled out on the couch, “can’t function without it. So sit up and get chomping, my woefully hormonal friend.”

Settling in beside him with no regard for where his limbs already occupy the seat, she sets down her proverbial peace offering and wastes no time in pouring them both a large glass of wine, taking a sizeable sip from her own in the hopes of summoning some liquid courage.

“So, uh, this morning—that was kind of a bust, huh,” she says.

Nathaniel doesn’t answer, his mouth flattened into an unimpressed line. His silence gnaws at her, twisting the knots in her stomach even tighter, making her squirm.

“Listen, I know we both said some things that we’ve been stewing on for a long time. But in therapy we’re encouraged to focus on the good, rather than just the bad all the time. So even though there was a lot I apparently had to get off my chest in there, I just wanted to tell you… you did a lot of stuff right.”

His eyes finally flit up to her face at that, and emboldened, she presses on.

“You were… very sweet with me,” she says softly. “You always made me feel wanted. And never like I had to beg, or compete, or change myself to get your attention. So thank you.”

He swallows, nodding. When he starts plucking agitatedly at the grey throw she reaches out and grabs his hand on impulse, squeezing, the both of them starting and staring down at their joined hands until she lets him go like she’s been burned. 

Nathaniel clears his throat and finally picks up his wine glass, and she takes it as her cue to mirror the movement, draining the rest of it in a nervous gulp.

There’s something charged and uncertain in the air between them that she supposes has always been there, simmering beneath the surface, but has suddenly been dialled way up to eleven; it feels a little too much like that night she went to him, forever selfish in her loneliness, and let herself get lost in the liminal space of their limbs tangled up in his bedlinen. It had been so easy, lounging beside him on his leather couch the evening before, to forget how angry he’d made her that night and those first few days after they’d made the swap. It was familiar and comforting and she wants to go back to it, to their easy banter and the way they’d stayed up talking, swapping stories about their upbringings under the guise of keeping cover but being unavoidably struck by the way the tune of their childhood traumas sounded suspiciously the same. Before they’d lifted the lid on all the resentment they’d found so hard to reconcile.

“It wasn’t about Mona,” she says after awhile, and when he raises his eyebrows she rolls her eyes and says, “Okay, so maybe it was a little bit about Mona. But it didn't have any right to be—I know that. I broke up with you. You were free to go… sow your seed wherever you wanted.”

He opens his mouth to protest but she cuts him off.

“The other part, that was true. I wanted you to tell me you understood. That me getting myself to a good place was the most important thing. I wanted you to tell me Hawaii could wait. And dude—I’d _just_ gotten out of jail. So it really could have. Let a girl settle back into her own bed, you know?”

He curls the side of his mouth up in a half-smile. “Maybe I didn’t think you needed the time to readjust, considering your bed is practically a prison cot.”

She can’t help herself—she snickers. “I mean, it did make settling into the slammer a little easier, it’s true. And getting used to a new bed has nothing on getting used to a new body.”

There’s a beat where they only watch each other, the two of them, sat side by side in the middle of minefield of their own making, trying to agree on the map that will see them both out unscathed.

“You seem to be handling this whole thing surprisingly well, considering,” Nathaniel admits.

She huffs out a laugh at that, and it only rings slightly hollow. “Let’s just say I’ve had a lot of practice at pretending to be someone else.”

It’s not surprising that she’s better at it than him—she’s used to the sensation of being a stranger to her own skin. To changing herself to fit the vision of what someone else wants her to be. She’s been working on that, working on figuring out the vision of what _she_ wants to be, but it hasn’t been easy. It’s fuzzy and frightening and there’s no right or wrong answers, and sliding into a role like Nathaniel—as terrifying as the whole ordeal has been—has in some ways been a welcome relief.

But it’s been five days and she can barely tell where Nathaniel ends and she begins anymore, and that realisation sends her heart pounding in her chest.

She’d meant what she said, about never feeling compelled to beg. The masquerade had been their own version of playing pretend, it’s true, but she knows now none of that front had been necessary for Nathaniel; she’d needed to reinvent herself to feel like she had the upper hand but his reverence for her never really shifted between her soft black sweater and sultry red dress. He’d started looking at her a certain way after that night they spent together in the elevator and if she’s honest, she knows he hasn’t really ever stopped since.

She feels a dizzying surge of gratitude to have him as her anchor, and the wanting—the overwhelming desire to be seen, held, known, _affirmed_ in the way he’s never once denied her—unfurls itself and starts to take determined root inside of her. 

For all the ways they drive each other crazy, there are far worse people she could be stuck with like this.

She pushes the thought aside, something slow and thrilling crystallising in her stomach until she puts down her glass on the coffee table with a pointed clink.

“I know what we should do. We should have sex,” she says abruptly, and at the flabbergasted way he stares at her, “Hear me out.”

His gulp is audible when she reaches out and sweeps his hair behind his ear, the pads of her fingers electric where they graze against his scalp. Her skin tingles at the touch, and for a second she thinks she can hear saxophones.

“Purely for scientific reasons,” she says, surprised by how gravelly it sounds to her own ears. “We’d practically be doing the world a disservice if we didn’t.”

“Scientific reasons,” Nathaniel repeats dumbly. “I thought you said—”

“I know what I said. But now I’m saying this.” She tilts her head, keeping her voice low and seductive as she leans into his personal space. “C’mon,” she purrs. “You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. The two of us, lying together in your big, warm bed these past few nights.”

Her hand trails down the side of his neck and Nathaniel’s gripping the arm of the couch like it’s the only thing holding him upright. She’s pretty sure she can’t be imagining it, the way his pupils are dark and overblown, his jackhammer heartbeat thrumming to life beneath her fingertips. That it’s not just the body she’s trapped in reacting to the others’ presence.

His eyes drop down to her mouth, and when he squeezes them shut she can tell he’s trying to stop thinking about how the lips are technically his own. “You have to admit it’s kind of…”

“Homoerotic?” she offers. “Yeah, I kind of got stuck on that part too, for a hot sec, but I moved past it relatively quickly. We’ve had sex with each other before. We’ve both masturbated before. This just… falls somewhere in a very complicated middle. Besides,” she adds as an aside, “I do have certain bi tendencies, so on some level this is an experimentation a long time coming, if you know what I mean.”

Nathaniel shakes his as if to dispel the variety of conflicting thoughts that produces.

Rebecca stares at his mouth— _her_ mouth, plump and pink and parted ever so slightly—and the slow and steady pulse of arousal she feels isn’t entirely free of ego, it’s true. But there’s something else there in the forefront; a familiar physicality, crackling in the unoccupied spaces between their bodies like electricity, purposeful and kinetic and only intensified by the heady buzz of the alcohol. She slides a hand over his knee and shifts closer to him on the couch.

“So… do you consent to this admittedly very weird activity?” she asks, her blunt nails tracing featherlight patterns over the skin along the crease.

Nathaniel swallows hard and lets his eyes flicker shut. “Uh…”

She wonders if it’s a result of some kind of body swap mind meld that she can practically hear what he’s thinking, the hesitation warring out in him like static until it ceases suddenly, goes radio silent, and then he’s closing the gap himself.

A noise that’s partway between relief and surprise claws its way out of her as she crawls eagerly closer, desperate not to let him stop now that they’ve gotten started. She can feel the heavy crease in his brow where his face butts up against hers, noses knocking together as their mouths move in tentative tandem, soft and slow and strangely sweet until it starts to grow urgent that they break for air.

“See?” she murmurs when they draw back infinitesimally, panting lightly, breaths still mingling between them. “Tastes the same.”

“If you close your eyes,” he agrees, pulling her back to him, and then his lips are on her lips in every iteration, their bodies humming, and suddenly the individual molecules and who they belong to don’t matter.

* * *

He doesn’t realise he’s grinding against her leg until she lifts it, uses his hips to pull him against it, and then he’s squeezing it between his thighs and moaning into her mouth.

It takes a bit of manoeuvring once they move to the bed, settling into something that feels right, the both of them clumsy as moths bumping together in the lamplight, until Rebecca sinks into the space between his thighs just as soon as his brain catches up long enough to realise he’s the one that needs to accommodate; his knees slide up around her hips and they both freeze because _god, finally—_ there’s the right kind of friction. There’s something fresh and exciting to be said for running on a different kind of instinct, on chemistry and muscle memory but so much disconnect. Rebecca only equivocates for a moment before letting her hands slide up under the fabric of his shirt, fingertips tingling at the prospect of spanning bare skin until she’s pushing his bra aside, palming a breast, cupping herself as she’s done countless times before but anew with someone else’s digits, someone else’s dermis, the arrangement of someone else’s DNA.

She skates her flattened palms up his ribcage until both breasts are cradled in the broad vees of her thumbs and forefingers, retracing the journey a couple of times, rubbing lightly at the skin, pressing the swell of them experimentally upwards with her hands settled into the crease. 

“Your hands are so big,” she tells him, trailing them back down and stretching them out to span the width of his waist.

Emboldened, she grazes a nail over a nipple and before he can stop himself, Nathaniel whimpers—a pathetic, needy sound accompanied by a full body shudder that runs right through him and terminates somewhere in his toes—and for a brief moment he has the gall to try and look appalled. The hand that wrapped around her wrist in a tight squeeze loosens its grip as he pants up at her, wishing he could bring himself to be annoyed by the delighted grin curling at the edges of her mouth.

There’s a beat, and the molten lava pooling through him, hot and viscous, wins out over his pride. “Do it again,” he gasps, hips tipping embarrassingly eagerly upwards, and Rebecca complies without hesitation, the overachiever in her clicking on over her head like an Edison bulb on a pull string in a dusty, dim garage.

“Oh, buddy. I am going to make this so good for you, you have no idea.”

He’s vaguely aware of her over him, behind him, body everywhere at once. His brain has never really had the chance to catch up, the way five days ago he was himself and now he’s not, how one minute they were laughing on his couch and now they’re curved together on his unmade bed, her spooned up against him, hard, with her hand between his legs trying to get the angle right and the press of her against his ass making him squirm. Five days ago he was losing her all over again and now he _is_ her, and she’s him, and the noises won’t stop synthesising from his throat.

Confusion and arousal, both par for the course around Rebecca, and suddenly he’s whining at the crook of her fingers inside him, clamping down, clutching at her wrist, coming so hard he sees in constellations.

* * *

She’s always had a complicated relationship with her body.

Her mother’s had a strong hand in that, her own ruthless preoccupation with keeping up appearances firmly foisted onto her only daughter. It wasn’t difficult, if she thought about it, to draw a line between being forced to take laxatives in the week leading up to her senior prom to better serve the cut of her dress and the growing compulsion she found in college to stick her fingers down her throat in that she might get boys to like her. A similar line could connect that same dot to roughly ten years later when Naomi would start slipping her little pink pills to mould her again into more like something she wanted her to be—and she’s done having such a slippery grip on her own agency.

It’s never properly extended to sex in that she’s always had a sense of how to wield that like a weapon; known on some inherent level that it’s the part of her in which she can convince someone she holds value. Learned early on how to blur for herself the distinction between the simple heat of _wanting_ and _being wanted—s_ he likes sex because it makes her feel good, makes her feel in control, and sex with Nathaniel has always made her feel very _, very_ good.

Now she has her body impossibly spread out before herself, half-naked, exposed—ready to catalogue all the ways in which it doesn’t measure up. But instead she’s seeing herself the way Nathaniel sees her—her vision hazy, rose-tinged, fond. Nathaniel likes her body for the most part because he likes _her_ , and while he’s admittedly on occasion been less than nice about it when his feelings have soured into something otherwise, there’s something dizzyingly pleasant in the pull, in the knowledge that it’s the proximity that’s of importance.

It’s intangible and impossible to properly describe, the way she’s herself and him all at once, how she can be thinking her own thoughts but her every experience is strained through a distinct filter of _nathanielnathanielnathaniel._ She initiates a movement and his body obeys, but the feedback comes with a fine-tuned flavour; when she skates a palm over bare skin it’s because she put it there, but when it feels like the softest surface she’s ever touched it’s because his synapses say it’s so. Nathaniel loves her and the knowledge of it lives inside his cells, and when she looks at herself, it’s almost like she loves her, too.

She’s stuck inside a positive feedback loop, and she doesn’t want to let it go. 

She pulls him to his knees as they slip the shirt up over his head between them, Nathaniel soft and malleable where he collapses against her, like warm, skin-coloured clay. He’s still trembling from his orgasm but she’s impatient, greedy; she rubs his underwear in a rough circle, the drag of the wet cotton against where he’s still sensitive making his knees buckle where she holds him against her.

Rebecca takes his hand in hers, guides it down between his legs.

“I wanna watch you touch me,” she tells him, breathless, tongue hot in the shell of his ear.

* * *

She’s stroking herself, stroking his dick and whimpering at how hard it is in her hands, and he feels like he could come just thinking about it, thinking about what she’s asking and her getting herself off in his body, the way she refused to before. 

“I think about fucking you all the time,” she gasps, forehead dropping to his shoulder. “Your body and my mind’s like, the world’s most horny combination and it really isn’t fair.”

“Well, your body’s not much better,” he sputters, frowning like he wants to protest more but unable to cut through the fog of his own arousal to form any further words.

He arches into where she’s cupping him with his fingers trapped amongst hers. It’s electric, the combination of sensations that are connected to his synapses and not, the confusing mix of skin he can feel and feel against and then her, tangled up in between. He flexes the joints obediently, experimentally, and with her coaxing sinks in to a tentative knuckle, gathers the moisture with his thumb. Hips rocking up like he’s fucking the air.

She stares unabashedly at where his digits disappear inside his underwear, her mouth slightly open as she reaches up and toys with his nipple. He groans at the way it swells and stiffens to a peak on tactile command, pinched red and aching in the cleft between her knuckles, the hot burst of arousal barrelling through him breaking and branching off in two directions.

He licks his lips, mouth suddenly dry, and Rebecca makes a noise like she hadn’t realised exactly what they were in for until now.

“God, that’s so hot,” she whispers, and then she’s kissing him, clutching hard at the back of his thigh, the heat of her sandwiched between their stomachs, and suddenly he’s not thinking about how weird it is any more.

* * *

It has to be harder for him, she thinks, having to be so suddenly cerebral in his own pleasure, and not knowing which sensations to focus on, to pursue; she thinks she has the element of surprise on her side, though, the way he nearly explodes with each new place she fits her mouth.

It almost feels like cheating, in a way, but they’re tempered enough by their own disconnect that it evens out. Still, she can’t help but grin at the whine he elicits when she latches onto _that_ spot beneath his ear, and she’s pretty sure he knows exactly what he’s doing when he rubs at the short hairs on the back of her neck and it sends shockwaves shooting down the entire length of her spine. There’s an aspect of competitiveness there, definitely, but Rebecca’s considerably more taken with exploring the finer nuances of their role reversals than Nathaniel—while she dutifully catalogues each response and reaction he’s more content to keep his eyes closed, limbs loose, running on sensation alone.

“Condom,” she breathes, once there’s nothing between them but skin, her eyes scrunching shut at the sensation. “God, we need a condom, because I didn’t want to trust you with my birth control and me getting myself pregnant is just a whole other plane of fucked up that I cannot deal with right now.”

They’re one-for-one on orgasms, now, if she counts their probably misguided encounter in the bathroom at work, and in retrospect, she has to. She’s never had the pleasure—and it’s definitely _pleasure—_ of watching herself fall apart before, too camera-shy at the prospect of pornography gone wrong to brave any kind of documentation in order to experience her own bed from anything but the first person. This is undeniably different, though—close enough removed to see each freckle on her cheek, hear each sharp intake of air, feel each involuntary undulation as her body dismantles, comes undone—and there’s something indescribably erotic in having a front row seat to witnessing it in all three glorious dimensions.

“Please stop talking,” Nathaniel says, his breath still arriving in shallow pants. He’s searching blindly through the bedside drawer for a foil packet, clumsy in his come-down. “This is already a lot to process and at some stage we’re really going to have reach a point of diminishing returns.”

She’s a little impressed he’s down for this, if she’s completely honest, uptight and disdainful as he can be. But she also remembers the way he was those two, three weeks before she ruined it for him—hesitant but willing, always eager to try, eager to please—and supposes she shouldn’t be so surprised. _No girl has ever done that to me before_ , she can still hear him rasping, his knuckles white around the sheets. Like he had any idea, the things she could do to him now.

“This okay?” she murmurs, not entirely sure if she’s seeking consent on behalf of his body, or hers, or both.

It takes a bit of fumbling between them, getting her into position, but then she sinks into him and her eyes practically roll back into her head.

“Oh my god,” she gasps, forehead dropping forward to rest against his. “Oh my god.”

“Yeah,” he says. “You feel…” He shifts, still adjusting to the sensation of being filled, his clench-grip on her ass relaxing some. He stifles a noise in the back of his throat. “You feel so good.”

She’s not sure if he’s talking in present tense or from past experience but she huffs out her agreement regardless.

It takes them awhile to get a rhythm going but she thinks she’s pretty good at this part, actually, since she had all that practice with Josh; not that she’d dare to tell Nathaniel, the way his body involuntarily clenches up at the thought of it, even under her control.

His hands are restless, grasping at her hips, her back, her shoulders like he’s struggling to stay afloat, and when she looks down at him he’s gazing up at her with something strange and indefinable in his face she can’t tear her eyes away from. It’s only when her field of sensation starts to narrow to the pressure building steadily below her waist that she drops her head down to his shoulder, sucking in air, trying to throw off the fog.

“Okay,” she says, gasping for breath. “Speaking from my very limited experience and in the interest of full disclosure, I think I’m gonna—”

“George,” Nathaniel says.

“Huh?”

“You need to think about George. You know how he prances around the break room singing those dumb little songs about making coffee? That. Think about that.”

“God,” she says, scrunching up her face. “George is the worst. Wait—are you telling me you’ve thought about George before while you were fucking me? Like, actual penis in vagina, just straight up inside of me, thinking about George.”

“I’m sorry—at what point exactly were you ever dissatisfied with my staying power?”

“That’s fair,” she concedes. “Okay. George making coffee. George’s dumb sweater vests.” She shifts experimentally and bites back a moan. “George talking about pottery… yeah, okay, I think it’s working.”

“Uh-huh.”

“George doing magic tricks. George’s stupid Instagram dedicated to his demonic looking cat.”

“It kind of works better for the other party if you just do it in your head.”

“Yeah, okay.”

She pushes back up onto her elbows to look at him and then she’s sinking back down, kissing him, kissing herself, holding on to how she’s experiencing everything in an echo. Nathaniel lets out a grunt when she changes angle, grabbing him behind his left knee and tugging until he’s hitched over her hip, welcoming her in deeper, taking all of her to the hilt.

“Ladies first,” she breathes, slipping her hand between them and thumbing at his clit until he groans, the noise too broken and guttural to be coming from her vocal chords. 

It’s all too much—the tight, wet heat; the knowledge that she’s inside of him, inside herself as he’s coming apart—and the dam bursts on her next stroke downwards. Her hips are jerking independent of her control, like she’s electrified, and the current flows through the both of them, through to Nathaniel where they’re joined and sends him shuddering, knees squeezing at her sides from the force of it.

It’s different to the bathroom, and so much better, being in buried in something and surrounded by bare, sweaty skin; locked in by their shared body heat and sprawled out on a bed. She feels like she could happily not move for a week.

Nathaniel thumbs at the small of her back while she twitches, and she hums in appreciation.

“Oh, that feels nice,” she mumbles, face tucked into his neck.

“I know.” Then, “You should probably—”

“Yeah.”

He hisses as she slips out of him. She rolls off him to deal with the condom, grimacing, dizzy with the surrealness of it all. It’s only when she stumbles back to the bed— muscles groaning their exhausted protest—that the reality of what they’ve done reoccurs to them, and the uneasy awareness immediately blankets them in awkwardness. Cuddling seems too deliberate, too intimate—absurd, given the circumstances, but true—and they both fidget on their respective sides of the mattress.

“Whew. So that didn’t work,” Rebecca says after a stretch of silence interrupted only by their breathing, pushing the crest of her hair up from her forehead.

“What?”

“I was kind of hoping that might switch us back. Partnered orgasms, two bodies occupying the same space, and all that.” She averts her gaze to ignore the way Nathaniel can’t stop his features from arranging themselves into something vaguely wounded.

She feels like she’s sinking in honey, her every movement slow and leaden and stuck together.

“Okay, so I’m never going to make fun of men falling asleep straight after sex again,” she announces. “Because I am fucking beat.”

She turns her head to look at him, then reaches up to tweak a nipple, curving her hand to cup his breast. It isn’t particularly seductive—her manner is more a detached kind of unabashed curiosity than anything. “So fucking weird,” she hums, letting her fingers meander down his body to stroke his stomach. She swipes them once lazily between his legs, biting her lip at his involuntary twitch and wiping the resulting stickiness on his thighs before letting her arm drop down onto the bed between them. 

Her eyelids start getting too heavy.

They doze and wake and experiment a little more, after that; Rebecca’s mouth dragging hot and eager over the heat of him, neither of them particularly surprised when he very firmly draws the line at returning the favour. She doesn’t mind, though—taken enough with the new sensation of skin on other areas of skin and the mewling sound Nathaniel makes whenever her prior knowledge pays off, with the words he manages to murmur in her ear in between.

The thing is, there are certain ministrations Nathaniel is very, _very_ good at, and she figures it’s only fair he get to reap the rewards to that himself at least once. 

He nearly breaks her nose, the way his hips rocket up off the bed at the first tentative stripe she ventures along his folds, and she gasps, the sound muffled, cartilage crushed against the crease of his thigh until she manages to wrangle him down with a heavy arm across his hip bones.

“Oh my god,” he says, with barely enough air left in him to make out the words. “Shit. Sorry. Oh my god.”

She’s tasted herself before, strictly secondhand and probably most frequently from Nathaniel’s mouth, but it takes a moment of getting used to, immersing herself in it literally head on. Nathaniel can’t stop making little _ahh_ ing sounds every time her tongue swipes up the length of him, and this time she’s ready when his pelvis tries to snap forwards, bracing him down against the bed as she redoubles her efforts. He’s writhing, babbling nonsense like a body possessed, and his legs are restless—heels hot with friction from where they drag up and down the sheets as he thrusts up against her mouth. It’s a satisfying kind of sting when his fingers fist roughly in her hair, holding her deep down between his cinching thighs until she can barely breathe, every last oxygen molecule in her brain dedicated to sucking hard on his clit as he comes.

She manages to extricate herself from the vice-grip of his thighs to replace her mouth with two of her fingers so she can watch him while he still trembles and quakes with the aftershocks, prolonging the crest of the wave, pushing him right back up it again. _God_ , he's so wet; her skin wrinkling into eager prunes at the tips and it sets every atom in her spinning until she’s dizzy with it, rubbing up against the roof of him, stirring him lazily, stretching and scissoring him wide.

Her cock—and _jesus,_ her tongue feels too thick in her mouth just thinking it—curves up towards her navel, making its presence more than known. It’s heady, the overwhelming urge to be _inside_ something, and she claws her way back up his body to join him on the pillows, kissing him while he’s still splayed out, blissed and boneless beside her.

She’s used to seeing herself like this in the bathroom mirror post-sex, chest flushed and blotchy, dark hair tangled and forehead dewy with sweat. She’s never found it particularly flattering, but there’s something so endearing in knowing it’s Nathaniel in there somewhere, swimming in endorphins, drowning in the cocktail of chemicals that accompany release.

“You taste like you,” he mumbles, still drunk off his orgasm, and she laughs and pushes her tongue deeper into his mouth.

Something pleasantly primal pulses through her—a protective, masculine pride—at the way her body so effortlessly envelopes his, and she wonders what Nathaniel’s thinking, wrapped up in her in a way that’s never been possible before, if he’s feeling safe and secure and small. 

They stay like that, tangled, kissing clumsily, languid, until her lower extremities start to become more insistent in protest of their neglect. She hauls him closer with a hand on the back of his thigh. “Please,” she breathes. Her hips push desperately into him. “I need you to…”

His fingers are loose, when they close around her, like he can’t get his muscles to grip right, but then he’s dragging his bowed palm up the underside of her shaft and the groan comes out from so deep within her it rattles her whole body with the force of it. 

She wants to fuck him again—and of course she’s not totally sure but she thinks he might like that, too—but she’s still slack-limbed from the first time, the nightstand so faraway. She thinks he gets it, the way he shifts to rock against her leg instead as he strokes her, unhurried and eyes fluttered closed. He digs his fingertips into her neck to pull her into him as she comes across his stomach with a needy whine, sinking her teeth into the swell of his shoulder, unable to miss the way he flinches when the heat of it hits him.

“I’ll get a cloth,” she says once she’s summoned enough energy to push herself further up onto her elbows.

He shakes his head, trying to keep himself clear of all the bedding and wincing when her mess gathers sticky in his navel and the creases of his belly. “I’ll just… I think I’ll just shower.”

He slides out of the bed to head for the bathroom and she lets herself flop back into the pillows, orienting herself around the damp patch they’ve left in the sheets, stretching out, replete. For a moment she lets herself revel in the pure contentment radiating out through her limbs, letting her heartbeat slow and her breathing even out.

“Oh my god,” she murmurs, swiping at the sweat drying on her forehead.

Only then the satisfied smile slides right off her face. _Oh my god,_ she thinks as a follow-up, heart thudding, no longer quite so foggy with arousal. _Oh my god oh my god oh my god._

Because that was way more intense than it should have been—more tender than she should have ever allowed.

Flinging back the covers, she stalks over towards the couch where the wine bottle is still on the coffee table, only three quarters empty, and promptly drains the rest of it. The air in the apartment is suddenly stifling, too thick, and she fumbles with the latch on his window to push it upwards, gulping down oxygen as the balmy wind rattles its way in through the opening, soothing against her sweat-slick skin.

She stares at the bar of light visible under the bathroom door, the dull roar of her pulse blending with the sound of his shower, and wonders approximately how mean it would be to kick him out of his own bed.

* * *

The lights are all off when he gets out of the shower, the only illumination spilling from the bathroom door in a tight corridor across the bed. Rebecca’s sitting up on her side of the mattress, her knees drawn up against her chest. She’s panicking, he can tell, and he can tell because a part of him’s panicking too. 

The part that’s not, though—the part of him that at some point in the last year became focused solely on spending as much time inside Rebecca Bunch’s orbit as humanly possible—is counteracting the anxiety with a blanket sense of calm.

She looks up at him, and then lets out a short bark of a laugh. “The towel,” she explains, unfolding her legs and jerking her chin in the direction of where he’s absent-mindedly knotted it around his waist, obfuscating nothing in terms of his ample upper body. “I don’t know which part is more ridiculous—the whole tits out kind of look you’ve got going on or the fact you’re shielding me from my own vagina.”

His answering huff is equal parts amusement and relief, some of the coiled-tight sensation easing out of him as he sees her relax, too. In a strange burst of confidence he feels like he’s drawing from deep within Rebecca’s body, he shucks off the towel and moves back towards the bed, crawling up the mattress until he’s beside her, half over her, partway pushed up on his knees.

“Oh,” Rebecca says, so quietly he almost doesn’t catch it as her hand wraps around his hip and squeezes.

“Hi,” he says.

She lets out a breath. “Hi.”

She reaches up to toy with the wet tangle of his hair that’s cascading down over his bare shoulders, her eyes tracking the movement until she’s tugging at him with her other arm, pulling him down and against her as she wriggles herself off the headboard into the same recline. He ends up kind of tucked into her neck, the stubble dusting her throat rough against the bridge of his nose.

“Hey, I just realised something,” she says, craning back to look at him. “I can finally be the big spoon.”

Nathaniel laughs, the sound coming out unexpectedly sweet, and just like that, the weird tension between them is properly broken. “Huh,” he says, mirroring her pose. “I guess you can.”

After a moment of studying her face he rolls over obligingly, presenting his back to her, and she edges closer, sliding a tentative arm around his bare waist and nosing into the crown of his head. It’s almost suffocating, but in a good way—the warm, ubiquitous weight of her wrapped around him like a cocoon, the oxytocin working double-time to wash over him in approval.

Rebecca runs her nails lightly down his arm and after a second’s hesitation he entangles his fingers with hers to keep her still, tugging her hold tighter. 

“Mm. My hair smells good,” she mumbles. “But it’s going to be a mess tomorrow, going to bed with it wet like that.”

Her free hand starts combing rhythmically through the damp knots, separating them out into strands and commanding him closer towards sleep with every gentle rake. It’s both confusing and not completely uncommon, the tidal wave of affection for her that floods through him at having her so close like this, even as their situation—in every aspect but the most literal—has them positioned miles apart. His post-coital haze has him drifting on another plane, where their attachment to physical form, their own or otherwise, feels irrelevant, and as he blinks in stubbornness at the lull towards slumber he wonders briefly if Rebecca’s earlier hypothesis was right; if this is them ascending, slipping loose, souls ready to switch back places in the night.

“Rebecca, I—”

“Ssh,” she says, giving a short, sharp shake of her head against his shoulder, her own voice thick with sleep. “Don’t. Don’t say anything. Don’t ruin it. Please.”

He lets his hand leave hers where it dangles over his hip to slide up under his chin atop the pillow. Her leg nudges itself between his calves, like she doesn’t want to leave an empty inch between them, like she’s keeping her body close enough to claw her way back inside if she’s given half the chance.

The wind wails outside the window, and before Nathaniel can consider anything to the contrary, he’s asleep.


	7. now our bodies are the guilty ones

Her first thought when she stirs in the morning is that she feels sticky.

Unlike Nathaniel, she hadn’t had the forethought—or the energy—to shower, and all the sweat that had resulted from the previous evening’s exertions still clings to her, stale and souring. The window’s open and it’s early enough that the heat hasn’t had a chance to set in yet, the resulting combination of the dry wind and the sunlight only beginning to creep in leaving the apartment for the most part pleasantly balmy for the time being, Nathaniel’s thin slate sheet pooling at her waist affording the appropriate level of cover. The heat source disrupting the delicate balance comes in the form of Nathaniel himself, snoring unceremoniously into her left pectoral, the errant arm he’s thrown across her waist sealing the damp from his washing and subsequent wet hair between them. 

He’s warm, and they’re naked, and they’re tangled together, and Rebecca’s heart rises up in her throat at the realisation.

She holds her breath as she attempts to extricate their entwined limbs, praying to every deity she doesn’t believe in that he doesn’t stir just yet—that she can have just this one moment to herself before she has to factor Nathaniel and his feelings and the way he insists on looking at her even in her body into what she’s thinking. Because she’s not stupid, and she knows, she _knows_ there’s more at play here than mere curiosity and her own sense of insouciant inevitability—no matter what her own interpretation of his words and his intentions end up being, Nathaniel has made it very clear when it comes to the two of them where he stands emotionally. She’s long lost the pathway where she gets to play it dumb.

He snuffles and shifts, letting out a sleepy moan, and she freezes as he twists and rolls away from her before sinking back into the pillows, falling still.

Successfully free of his embrace, she heads straight for the shower, ratcheting the temperature control up to just shy of scalding in an attempt to sear away the panic already starting to seep from deep within her pores. 

Mental preoccupation aside, though, her inherited biology is still caught up in the whole naked-bodies-pressed-together part of the morning’s fallout, and she grunts at the persisting inconvenience, easing off the water to something slightly more short of boiling, aware of her pink skin starting to sing its protest. She’s taking care of it before the motion even properly registers, forehead dropped against the tile and taking herself absently in soaped-up hand, mind filled with steam and the sound of the stall door sliding open, the image of Nathaniel’s body pressing her body into the foggy glass so heady that she’s not sure which point of view her mind is inhabiting in this scenario, taking or being taken, until she’s both of them all at once, gasping, coming hard into her hand in a matter of moments.

“Shit,” she mumbles, leaning back against the wall. Because this morning is already careening wildly away from the physical boundaries she’s set previously and is planning to firmly re-establish, all the while her heartbeat thudding its mocking satisfaction in her chest.

Wrapping herself in the navy kimono bathrobe Nathaniel owns but she’s never once seen him wear, she busies herself making coffee and when she drops down into one of the apartment’s multitude of armchairs—how many places can one person require to sit, honestly—it’s almost time for the alarm to go off.

Her fingers rap nervously on the mug.

* * *

He’d been vaguely aware of Rebecca vacating the space beside him, the distant sound of the shower running seeping into the edges of his dreams. So it’s not entirely disconcerting when his phone’s wake up call jerks him back into consciousness and she’s no longer pressed up alongside him, the resulting void in the mattress still emanating latent warmth; what catches him off-guard, however, is blinking awake to the sight of her sitting directly across, watching him, the expression on her face almost comically grave.

“I made coffee,” she says, quickly thrusting a second mug at him, and Nathaniel sits up and accepts it with hesitation.

“This feels suspiciously like a job interview,” he says.

“Please, like you’ve ever had to sit through one of those.”

He has, actually—because that was the way his father liked to do things; even in his nepotism he drove a hard bargain—but he’s not about to get into that now. “From the other side of the desk, yes.”

“Ah.”

There’s an uncomfortable silence. _Don’t_ , he thinks at her desperately. _Don’t say this was another mistake_.

“So,” she says, drawing out the word, voicing pitching unnaturally high. “Last night. That was… a thing that we did.”

He swallows. “Uh-huh.”

“And it was…”

“Fine,” he suggests.

“Right. It was fine.” She crosses her legs in an ill-advised reflex, quick to readjust and undo the motion. “Enjoyable, even. Some orgasms were had.”

His eyes flutter shut in a wince. “Uh-huh.”

When he opens them again, she’s still staring at him, gripping the handle so hard her hands are turning the colour of the porcelain. It’s not just panic, then, he realises—she’s _nervous_ , about how the two of them should approach this, _together._ Some of the tension flows out of him at the distinction, and he offers her a tiny smile.

She lets out a breath, and then she’s giving him a tiny smile right back.

“It’s a little weird, right?” she asks in a rush, all pretence dropped. “Like, last night it was all intriguing and sexy and taboo, but now in the light of day it’s…”

“…awkward?” he ventures.

“Yeah,” she agrees, regarding him with visible relief as he drops out of the bed and starts pulling on his underwear. “Yeah. You know when you’re watching some kind of weirdly specific porn, and you’re super into it—you’ve lit some candles, your motor’s running, that dude’s got his big toe inside some other dude’s nostril and it’s the hottest thing you’ve ever seen—but then, like, the _second_ you come, you kind of take a step back and ask yourself what the fuck you just watched? That. It was like that.”

He wants to point out that they went a little bit beyond preliminary orgasms, both times, but he’s too busy trying to keep the sour tide of disappointment washing through him from making itself known on his face, forcing himself to translate it instead into suspicion. “What kind of porn are you watching?”

“Doesn’t matter. The point is, we’ve done it. And now we’ve done it, we can say well—that’s what that was like, and move on. And it doesn’t need to happen again.”

“Right.”

Her gaze lingers a little too long to be completely innocent, zig-zagging down his figure, and an unexpected flush of arousal washes over him in its wake. She shakes her head as if to brush it off, eyes softening when they meet his own. “Hey, but also? It was kind of a fun exercise. In loving myself. Like, literally loving myself. Dr Shin would totally be all over this if I could tell him about it without getting myself committed. Really. I wish everyone in group could try it.” 

Though he’d been a bit more hard-pressed to share the sentiment, he’d noticed the tentative approbation with which Rebecca had all but worshipped her own body—the gentle way she’d catalogued each inch of her own skin as she’d been afforded such a new and unexpected point of view. Like he could miss it, being so pinned so thoroughly at the centre of her attention. 

He goes hot from head to toe at the memory of it.

Rebecca gnaws on her lower lip. “And I _was_ kind of taken with your—well, I guess my?—‘holy shit, _that’s_ an erogenous zone?’ face,” she teases. “But watching your own o-face up close—that’s a little confronting, right?”

“Couldn’t do it,” he agrees, indicating his eyes. 

She laughs at that, posture loosening as she leans forward to discard her cup of coffee on the nightstand. He remembers his own and recovers the mug to take a deep draw of the liquid, grateful to have something else to blame for the heat that hasn’t left his chest since they started talking. 

Rebecca’s hand rubs at the back of her neck, a signposting of discomfort he’s pretty sure she’s been bequeathed by his body. “We should, uh…” She gestures to the closet. “We have that hearing, in a few hours, so.”

“Right! Right.”

He pretends he can’t feel her eyes on him as he heads to the kitchen.

* * *

“Is there something going on between you and Darryl?”

Rebecca glances up from the legal pad she’s balancing on her lap as Nathaniel lets himself in to the apartment, a dry-cleaning bag draped over his left arm. “You mean, aside from the purely technical role I played in the siring of his latest offspring? No. Why?”

After a gruelling morning spent in staff meetings and a court date they’d thankfully managed to wrangle in their favour through some miracle of body swapped serendipity, they’d gone their own seperate ways after lunch. She’d somewhat gleefully left Nathaniel to fend off wedding talk from Paula, sequestering herself to his office to brainstorm and do research in the form of watching rom coms with the volume turned down low, slamming his laptop shut and fumbling her way through an excuse when Maya stumbled in at some point around the half way mark of her surreptitious viewing of the seminal classic _27 Dresses_.

She pauses in her perusal of her not-quite wedding toast, massaging her forehead and setting aside her last minute proofread in favour of fixing Nathaniel with a curious stare.

“He swung by the office this afternoon just to give me these,” he says, shaking a brown and gold box in her direction, “and he was being disturbingly coy.”

She snorts. “Oh what, just because I did it that one time you think everyone that brings you period chocolate is trying to get in your pants?”

Nathaniel scrunches up his face and drops the box onto the coffee table like he’s been burned. “What?”

She’s already got the lid off and is popping one into her mouth as she shrugs. “Yeah, in retrospect the boundaries got a lot blurrier after Darry actually had vested interest in my ovulation cycle, but I kind of forgot how weird it was after the first couple of months. And who’s gonna argue with free chocolate, right?” She gulps, swallowing the gooey eclair in one go. “Oh, bee-tee-dubs,” she tacks on casually as a non sequitur, already fishing for another wrapper, “you need reading glasses.”

He’s facing away from her, half bent over the bed as he removes his suit from its protective plastic casing, and she watches as his spine stiffens then straightens. “No I don’t,” he says automatically.

“Yeah, dude. You kind of do,” she argues, getting up off the couch. “Like, it took me awhile to put my finger on it, since, you know—there’s been a lot of micro-adjustments in body physiology to make in this whole scenario—but that squinty, headache-y feeling is not normal.”

Ignoring her, he refocuses on the task at hand, dipping to slide the bag off where it catches on the bottom of the trousers. She knows he’s heard every word, despite him pretending otherwise, and she sashays closer, hands taking up haughty place on her hips. 

“Let me guess,” she prods, determined to get a reaction out of him. “Your dad has a dumb saying about glasses, too.”

“My vision is perfectly fine, thank you very much,” he snaps at her, tone absurdly petulant, but it only makes her laugh all the more as she trails after him in his escape towards the kitchen.

“Oh my god. You are _so_ stubborn,” she exclaims. “Stop being such a stupid prideful _man_ and just get your eyes tested. Hey, I’ll even do it for you.”

“I don’t need you to get my eyes tested,” he says, firmly, “because I don’t need glasses. So let it go.”

“Who even cares what your dad says—I say spectacles are sexy.” She leans over the counter as he rifles through the fridge for a water bottle. “Mm-mm, now I’m imagining us wearing, like, a dark cashmere sweater and thick, tortoiseshell rims. So broody. Like… like a sexy librarian.”

Nathaniel sighs out his exasperation. “Just to clarify—you _do_ still want me to attend your housemates’ wedding as you, _and_ deliver a speech in your place, correct?”

She bites her lip when he whirls around to glare at her, and promptly scrambles back out to the couch to retrieve her writing pad, cackling all the while.

* * *

The mirror’s still fogged up from Nathaniel’s shower by the time she gets her turn in the bathroom, and she scrubs at the condensation with the butt of her palm, carving out a misshapen window through which she can peer at herself, tilting her head back to examine her increasingly unwieldy whiskers. 

She’s in the middle of contemplating the appropriate course of action when Nathaniel materialises beside her in the reflection.

“What are you doing?”

“I was going to try and tidy up a bit,” she says, gesturing loosely to her jaw. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been digging the whole James Bond vibe, but I feel like we’re starting to venture into Man vs Wild territory and it _is_ a wedding.”

Nathaniel eyes the pink disposable in her hand with thinly veiled disgust. “If you think for a second that you’re going to be hacking at my face with that hunk of plastic junk, you are very sorely mistaken.”

She rolls her eyes. “What, you think because it’s pink it’s got cooties?”

“No, because there’s a proper way to shave and _that_ is not it. Move. Out the way.”

He reaches past her to press down on the mirror, popping open the medicine cabinet with a click and pulling out a mahogany box that she supposes is exactly as pretentious looking as she should expect from someone like him. When he flicks open a menacing-looking hardwood-handled straight razor and starts gliding the edge of it up and down the strop to sharpen it, her eyebrows climb her forehead.

“Oh, so you were worried about a couple of nicks from my pink-taxed Schick Hydro but you expect me to let you Sweeney Todd off my stubble with your little fold up sword?”

The hint of a smirk on his face, ignoring her, he runs a washcloth under the hot faucet before squeezing it out and tossing it in her direction.

“Hot towel service? How very JetBlue of you.”

Holding the warm, wet cloth obligingly across the lower half of her face she watches, transfixed, as he mixes the foam into a thick lather in the wooden cup. When he eventually turns back to her—loaded bristle brush in hand—he considers the issue of their height difference for a brief moment before clearing a space next to the sink to hoist himself up onto, beckoning her into the opening between his thighs with an expectantly raised eyebrow.

She acquiesces by sliding her now-damp palms over his knees to brace herself, satisfied by how it makes him pause and clear his throat, flicking the wrist holding the brush outward in a way that’s so quintessentially Nathaniel it makes her smile.

It tickles, the swirling motion that he sweeps across her until she’s sporting a faux white beard comprised entirely of foam. But then he’s hooking the brush back into its cradle in favour of the razor and though she knows that logically, the likelihood of him hurting her—whether she’s stuck in his body or not—is slim, she can’t help but feel a little queasy as he flips it open.

Still, there’s something comforting in the quiet confidence with which he lets the handle hook between his fingers, held up by his pinky, his grip steady even though the hands are not his own. She holds her breath at the first stroke of the blade against her skin, unable to stop the quiet hiss that slips out of her. The corners of Nathaniel’s mouth only curl up in amusement as he presses her cheek upward again, straightening out the skin, guiding the sharp edge through the smattering of foam. 

She licks her lips and fishes for a distraction. “So, uh… did you dad teach you how to do this? A classic father-son, coming-of-age ritual?”

“Grandfather, actually,” he corrects. “And… something like that. This was a birthday gift. He said it teaches discipline. Focus. How to take pride in your appearance.”

“You don’t talk about him much.”

“No,” he agrees. “I don’t.”

Nathaniel nudges her chin back up with his knuckles and she obeys, looking down her nose at him as he methodically works his way down the right side of her face.

There’s something so unnervingly intimate in bearing her throat to another person—who just so happens to also be brandishing a deadly weapon—even if the throat in question is technically their own. Her body continues to thrum with nervous energy, her foot tapping intermittently against the tile in an attempt to expend some of it.

“ _His throat was there beneath my hand_ ,” she absently sings under her breath, oddly pleased with the way it comes out in Nathaniel’s timbre. “ _His throat was there and now he’ll never come again._ ”

Hands stilling, he frowns. “What?”

“ _Easy now, hush love hu_ —hmm, what? Nothing. I wasn’t singing, you were singing,” she says, and supposes in a way it’s technically true.

She tries to go silent and still when he firmly tips her head to the other side, ending up having to stifle a giggle when her mind supplies her with the mental image of the two of them in 18th century costumes, baking body parts into pretzels. The murder plot line hits a little too close to home, however, and she brings the musical number to a halt before it can properly begin.

The cold metal abrades against a sensitive patch above her pulse point and she shivers, her hand finding his hip on autopilot to ground herself. Nathaniel falters in return, making a low, surprised noise in the back of his throat.

“Careful,” she murmurs, swallowing in slow motion. “Don’t wanna slip and slice off that beauty spot.”

“Beauty spot?” he scoffs. “I do nothave a beauty spot.”

“Sure you do,” she says, carefully sliding her left hand up the side of her neck to find it, just beneath the layer of foam that ends up on her fingers anyway. “You’re like a regular Marilyn Monroe. Maybe you could rock some of those cat eye glasses.”

He lets out a low, warning growl at her return to the vetoed topic from earlier. “That is a _mole,_ thank you very much _._ A manly mole.”

She tries not to think of all the times she’s touched and kissed and nipped at the marking in question, humming out her skepticism as she reaches out to wipe the residual cream off onto his nose. He flinches, _tch_ ing his disapproval as his grip on her jaw tightens to keep himself steady.

“You’re being infuriatingly distracting for someone that currently has a sharp blade edging towards her carotid artery,” he admonishes, lowering the razor in exasperation.

“Well, the artery is technically yours, so.”

In light of how deft his hands are proving, she’s relaxed somewhat into the thrill of it; she trusts him, she realises, and the warm weight of that flutters through her stomach. Being on the receiving end of his intense focus is another matter entirely, though, and now that he’s paused in his task to scrutinise her, she can't help but squirm under his gaze.

“I need you to…” He draws his lips into his mouth in demonstration, pulling the skin taut, and she mimics the motion obediently, her hands tensing where they grip the counter as he skims her upper lip.

If she closes her eyes she can still remember the illicit scrape of his stubble as his mouth worked hers in the squealing elevator; the roughness of his cheeks beneath her palms that day on the porch and the teasing drag of it against her inner thighs that first weekend they’d barely left his bed. His body is instilled with a similar set of recollections, stirring with heat at the reminder, and she forces herself to push the thought away as Nathaniel finishes his final sweep. It’s dangerous, them being this close to each other, and she hates how much that appeals to her lifelong compulsion to play with fire.

His thumb glides over her Cupid’s bow before tracing each side of her jaw in turn, assessing its smoothness. Her skin, already stinging slightly from the shave, tingles at the touch.

“All done,” he murmurs.

His hand doesn’t leave her face.

She lets her eyes fall shut, her own hand coming up to fold over his, his grip warm in her own. But she can still feel herself starting to react to his proximity—her body and his alight with the knowledge from the night before—and determined not to stoke the coals of that particular campfire again she makes herself tug his palm away.

It’s her turn to clear her throat. “Need me to shave your legs for you?” she jokes, gesturing to the razor, annoyed with herself for how uneven it comes out.

“With this? Please. Like you should be allowed to hold sharp objects.” He pauses once the words are out of his mouth, realising what he’s said. “I didn’t mean—”

She squeezes his knee to mollify him. “That’s probably fair,” she says, stepping backwards out of his personal space, giving him room to slip back down off the counter.

She uses the now-cool washcloth to wipe off the newly smooth expanse of her jaw as Nathaniel reaches back into the cabinet to slide a bottle towards her. 

“For, um…” He gestures vaguely at his neck, not meeting her eyes.

“Yeah. Got it, thanks.”

The way he keeps his eyes low as he disappears from the bathroom tells her he’s just as affected as she is, and she dawdles, taking her time applying the aftershave and examining her face— _Nathaniel’s_ face—in all its freshly shaven glory in the mirror. She’s in the process of idly thumbing through the bag of cosmetic supplies she’d swiped from her house when they’d gone to find him something wedding-appropriate to wear, mentally planning out his impending makeover when she zeroes in on something tucked into the side pocket.

“So I think I found a way to return the favour,” she tells him when she steps back out into the living room, entirely too proud of herself, and tilts the tiny glass bottle at him with an impish grin.

_* * *_

Nathaniel studies his newly plum coloured nails closely in an attempt to divert his attention away from the intermittent grazing of Rebecca’s fingers at his nape.

Having her put make-up on him and curl his hair is about as surreal as watching his reflection in the mirror be the one to do it. She’s not quite as meticulous as he was with the straight razor—the side of his neck still stings where she’d slipped and briefly seared his skin with the curling iron—but she’d been suitably apologetic, dropping the offending instrument onto the vanity with a clunk and scrambling through his cabinet until she’d found some aloe vera lotion to soothe the burn.

The mascara makes his eyelids feel too heavy, and the undergarments she’s insisted on are constricting in a way he imagines only 18th century torture devices could have been; when he asks her if she’s given him something three sizes too small on purpose she only laughs at him, her expression mockingly sympathetic. 

He doesn’t stop to really consider the transformation until she’s done, stepping back and busying herself with packing up the curling wand and wiping the spilled powder from the lip of the basin, humming to herself all the while.

“Wow,” he can’t help himself from saying once he actually takes in his appearance. He darts his tongue out to wet his lips, stopping when he tastes lipstick. “Would it be considered narcissistic to say I look hot in this dress?”

Rebecca smiles, bumping her shoulder playfully into his as she runs a comb through her hair, slick with pomade. He has to admit she’s kind of mastered the art of it. “You don’t scrub up so bad yourself,” she murmurs, and he hates the way the words prickle along the back of his neck.

Once he’s helped her with her tie and she’s zippered the back of his dress, she tosses a pair of shoes at him, forcing him to duck to defend himself before stooping to pick them up. His eyebrows climb his forehead when he recognises the black cage heels he’d bought her for the masquerade.

“Thought it was only fair you got a taste of your own medicine,” she says, smirking. “Just be grateful I’m not making you wear the bra.”

He’s not entirely convinced its substitute could be much better.

“Phone,” she tosses over her shoulder when the object in question starts to vibrate on the coffee table.

The name Valencia—followed by several hearts, a donut and a wine glass emoji and accompanied by a photo of her face, blowing a kiss for the camera—flashes on the screen, and Nathaniel tamps down on the wave of apprehension that washes over him as he answers. “Uh, just putting you on speaker,” he says at Rebecca’s muted insistence, placing the phone down on the bed between them. “I’m still getting dressed.”

“You haven’t left yet? Rebecca! We need to take photos while it’s still light out and before this stupid wind messes with everybody’s hair. Plus you promised to lend me your boyfriend’s ample height for stringing up the festoon, remember?”

“We’ll be out the door in two minutes, tops.”

“Boyfriend’s arms at the ready,” Rebecca adds.

“And you’ve written your speech, right? That’s still happening?” Valencia needles. “Because it’s going to throw off the running order if it’s not.”

Nathaniel glances at Rebecca, who nods. “Taken care of,” he assures.

“Okay. I have to go. Beth’s putting out fires with the kitchen staff, by which I mean literally—there’s definitely smoke coming out of those ovens—and I am _not_ letting our girl get married with burnt sausage rolls, so I should probably intervene. Don’t be too long, mmkay?”

Rebecca carefully folds up the yellowed paper of her speech and tucks it into the rhinestone encrusted purse she shoves in his direction. “Well? You heard the woman—chop chop!”

He rolls his eyes and lets her shepherd him in the direction of the door.

* * *

She knows it’s decidedly unmasculine, the gasp she emits as they enter the reception area, but she can’t help it—she’s been conditioned to be easily seduced by the two-punch combo of fairy lights and flower arrangements, the simple but still sweepingly romantic scene Valencia’s managed to set in such a short period of time and on such a small budget sending her grasping at Nathaniel’s hand where he’s wrapped around her upper arm, holding onto her for added balance in the steepness of his shoes more so than for show.

“Oh my god, this reminds me so much of my senior prom. Which was on the whole kind of a major bust for me, but the decorations were so twinkly and magical.” She sighs, practically starry-eyed. “Ah, t’was the summer of 2007. _As I Lay Me Down_ by Sophie B Hawkins was the anthem of my MySpace profile, and I had sunken into a dark depression after Joseph Lebowitz demoted me from two to seven on his top eight, obviously at the behest of—”

Nathaniel clears his throat and cuts her off, making her conscious of the uncharacteristically wistful tone. “Does this embarrassing story have a point?”

She raises her hand to whack him playfully in the arm but at the look of abject horror she catches on Paula’s face from across the courtyard she quickly lowers it, paling as her friend starts to make her way over towards them.

“I’m so glad we’re now two for three on your friends thinking I’m an abusive asshole,” he deadpans.

Threading their fingers together in a poor attempt at cover, she offers him an apologetic wince. “Sorry,” she says, drawing the word out in a nasally whine that is equally jarring to the both of them when it comes out in his voice. “I guess my impulsive anger coupled with your muscle mass isn’t exactly a great look for us. _God_ , double standards are so confusing.”

“Sweetie, you’re here,” Paula says when she reaches them, gripping Nathaniel fondly by the forearms. “Nathaniel,” she adds, more than a little curtly, before refocusing her attention. “Oh, honey, look at you—you are just a vision in blue.”

Paula’s got a point, Rebecca muses, sizing herself up with the bizarre opportunity for self-reflection that can only come with inhabiting someone else’s brain. It’s not like looking in a mirror, with the glass so eager to highlight each and every flaw. Nathaniel holds himself a lot more stiffly than she ever does—imbues her body with an air of gravitas—and coupled with the cut of her gown, the result is unusually elegant, even if the illusion is easily undone the moment he actually has to walk anywhere. 

“You,” Valencia says as soon as she joins them, crossing her arms and tilting her chin to look down her nose at Rebecca. “Your services _will_ be required elsewhere, so don’t disappear. But we’re going to be borrowing your girlfriend for awhile.”

Nathaniel’s eyes widen slightly, silently pleading with Rebecca to save him as Valencia loops her arm tightly through his and starts tugging him towards the main building.

The pang of disappointment—the sudden, painful awareness of everything of which she’s missing out on—makes it hard for her to breathe.

She squeezes his hand so tight it hurts. “Hey. Tell Heather she looks beautiful,” she whispers before she lets go, and Nathaniel, so far out of his depth, nods and does as he’s told.

* * *

“—and _then_ I said, who cares if she’s only a few months old, incapable of walking and lacking the hand-eye coordination to hold things. She lived inside you for nine months, so if anyone’s going to be the flower girl at this wedding, it _has_ to be Hebby. I can help her carry a basket.”

“Uh-huh,” Rebecca says, entirely noncommittal as she jabs at her drink with the tiny black straw. “I see your point.”

“But then Heather said the ceremony was going to be strictly non-traditional—more like a house party, than anything—and that there weren’t going to be any flower girls, or bridesmaids, or even a ring-bearer! And I said, well, that hardly sounds like a wedding at all!” Darryl drops his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “When I married Madison’s mom, the rings were supposed to be carried in on the back of her family’s Saluki. Let’s just say that did _not_ go as planned, but it did make for a good story.”

She startles when the phone in her breast pocket and smart watch start vibrating in tandem, frowning when she twists her wrist and sees the name scrolling across the glass screen. “Listen, Darryl—that’s riveting, it really is—but I’ve got to take this. Could you excuse me?”

Finding a quiet corner away from the indistinct chatter of impatient party goers, she thumbs across the sliding bar to answer, steeling herself. Grateful for the reprieve but anxious, her eyes scan around for Nathaniel as she lifts the phone to her ear, as if the mere sight of him will offer her some sort of guidance.

“Dad,” she says haltingly. “Now’s not really a good—”

“We’re having this conversation now, Nathaniel. Whether you like it or not.”

* * *

“I, um. I love fairytales,” he begins, “and this is from the greatest fairytale of all—the Bible.”

Nathaniel lets out his own nervous huff at that, even as he hears the priest give a not-completely-surprised little _oh_ from off to his left and a murmur of laughter titters through the audience. Now that he’s up at the podium it occurs to him it probably would have been advisable to give Rebecca’s speech a once-over before taking centre stage—God, somewhat appropriately, only knew what she might have tasked him to say in front of all these people. He pauses to smooth out the sheet of paper, his fingertips tracing over her messy handwriting as if that might invoke the charming method of delivery he knows he’s going to fall woefully short of emulating.

He clears his throat. “Love is patient, love is kind. Love is taking your boyfriend to the ER for his pus-y black toe. Love is supporting your girlfriend through her pregnancy with someone else’s baby. Love is… finding your person.” He pauses, wets his lips. “It’s finding yourself, and seeing yourself in someone else along the way.” 

He glances over to where Heather and Hector are seated, noses wrinkled, foreheads butted together and their eyes on nothing else. He almost doesn’t dare to look for Rebecca, the way his hands are already threatening to shake and his tone feels all at once too wooden, too raw. 

“Love is skateboards, and surfboards, and fighting over Monopoly boards. Love is two separate lives, irrevocably intertwined.”

Rebecca isn’t looking at him—her own line of sight is on the happy couple, misty-eyed—but for moment all he can see is her; not her in his body but _her,_ all bright smiles and laughter and soft curves like she’s carved out of sunshine. When he blinks it’s back to the shape of him again, the sharp cut of his suit and freshly shaved jaw. But her eyes have swivelled back to his and they’re shining, and she’s swallowing, her demeanour something indiscernible shifting between happy and sad.

“Love isn’t a fairytale. It’s learning to live in the moments in between, with someone by your side that sees you, that hears you, that knows you like a second skin. That knows the ugly parts of you and doesn’t turn away. Love is never having to do it alone—dishes and laundry and all the other boring stuff included. Because love is about finding your partner, your team. And once you do, the two of you will be unstoppable, together, forever and ever, amen.” Nathaniel swallows hard. “Sorry,” he tacks on hastily with an apologetic glance in Father Brah’s direction.

He barely registers the vows that follow as he makes his way back into the small crowd, pausing only to let Paula hug him in approval, managing to make himself remember to return her quick embrace. It takes him by surprise when the throng of guests around him throw themselves to their feet, whooping their congratulations, surging forward to offer their well-wishes in person.

By the time he makes it over to where he last saw Rebecca, she’s nowhere to be found.

* * *

“Hey, roomie,” Heather says as she squints up at him. “You come to partake?”

He’s given up trying to track down his elusive dinner date, resigning himself to the dreaded fate of co-mingling with Heather’s half of the would-be bridal party, having spent the last hour throwing back cocktails with Paula and Valencia and their respective partners, trying to laugh at all the appropriate moments and not appear too obvious in his ongoing scanning of the crowd. He might as well round out the trifecta and punch in with the lady of the hour herself while he’s at it, he supposes.

“Getting high to survive your own wedding?” he quips, dropping down beside her on the bench. “You know there’s a little something called divorce, if you’re desperate.”

“Mm, funny,” Heather says. “You’re funny.” She sticks the joint back in her mouth when he doesn’t take it, dropping her head onto his shoulder. “Hey,” she drawls, dragging out the word for several more beats than necessary. “Are we okay?”

He contemplates the loaded-ness of that question for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admits.

“That’s fair,” she nods. “And in that case, thanks for not giving a speech about how love isn’t leaving town when someone you care about is trying to get their life together, I guess.” 

Nathaniel’s stomach somersaults so hard it leaves him winded, his eyes squeezing guiltily shut. “Don’t mention it.”

She’s traded in her wedding dress from earlier for something shorter and more practical while still managing to look like it’s been made out of one of his mother’s vintage table cloths, and if Nathaniel had a type Heather would be so far towards the other end of the sliding scale it wouldn’t even be a consideration, but he’s struck all of a sudden by how pretty she looks, now that’s he’s stopped close enough to pay attention. She looks radiant, happy, her cheeks shining, and he wonders idly how much of that is marital bliss versus the marijuana.

“So where’s Mr Legally Blonde?”

“Huh?”

Heather makes a wriggly gesture with her hand pressed against her forehead that suggests rooster to him more than anything else. “You know—your walking, talking personification of white privilege with the playful hair. Aren’t you guys like, enthusiastically boning, or something? I’ve barely seen you this entire week so I kind of just assumed you kids were living out some kind of wild domestic fantasy in his fancy industrial loft, or whatever.”

He lets out a laugh that’s partway between amused and affronted. “I guess you could call it something like that.”

“Well?” Heather prods.

“Well what?”

“Which is it? Are you two, like, an actual thing again now? Or are you just kind of like, fucking him out of your system?” She smooths out the crocheted lace of her dress. “I need to know if he’s just at my wedding so you have someone to make out with when you get sad or if I should suck it up and play nice because he’s going to be on the list for housewarmings and future games nights, too.”

He frowns. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

He can’t help but give pause to imagine what Heather’s talking about—his everyday life, enmeshed with Rebecca’s. Where her friend’s wedding isn’t a one-off, but the first in a string of endless events they’ll RSVP to as a pair—birthdays and brunches and holiday barbecues, where _Rebecca and Nathaniel_ is a given, not a possibility—and he aches with unexpected longing. In the few short weeks they’d been together, they hadn’t spent much time outside the confines of his apartment, or his bed, for that matter. Their relationship—both then and during the eight month affair—hadn’t exactly played out in the public eye, nor had he ever really stopped to consider what that might look like.

Rome, Hawaii—those were the leaps his mind made when he wasn’t caught up in the idea of having her beside him, wrapped up in his sheets. Fairytales and escapes, when Rebecca was trying so hard to deal in realities.

“Yeah… I’ve never understood what you see in that guy,” Heather says, scrunching up her mouth. “He’s so uptight and douchey, and he doesn’t like carbs. Just, like, the exact opposite of everything I thought you’d go for.”

“Is he, though?” Nathaniel counters.

“Yeah, he kind of is. A lot.”

A server passes by and Heather flags them down some champagne, knocking her flute companionably against his before downing it in one gulp. He follows suit, and if it wasn’t already before, his bloodstream starts to feel like it’s fifty percent carbonation.

“We’re not really anything,” he admits, the words bubbling up and out before he can stop them. He scrunches his eyes shut. “Nothing official, anyway. But no, you know what? We _are_ —what word did you just use?”

“Boning?” Heather offers, raising her eyebrows.

“Right. Boning. We did do… that. About a week ago. And then again last night. And sh.. _he_ ,” he continues, gesturing vaguely in the direction of where he presumes Rebecca is still hidden amongst the other partygoers, “can pretend it’s nothing all he wants. But it’s not. It’s not nothing. It can’t _be_ nothing. Right? Not with everything we’ve been through.”

“Do you still love him?” Heather asks, with what can only be described as a pitying grimace.

“I don’t know anymore,” he says quietly. “I thought I did. But I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m thinking or feeling or where any of this is going, or what it means, and I hate it.”

She studies him for a long moment, like she’s staring straight into his soul, and an absurd rush of panic rises up in Nathaniel that she’s going to look right through Rebecca’s body and see him for who he really is. But then she’s blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth and driving the joint into the ground with the point of her boot, and the eerie sense of being uncomfortably exposed flickers out and passes.

“I get it. Sometimes you gotta just, like, surrender to the chaos of the universe. But also? Sometimes it’s just a choice.” Heather stretches and drags herself upright from her slouch. “Is Hector the man I’ve been dreaming about since I was a little girl? No, because I was smart enough to know the mere ideation of the perfect man was a waste of time. But if I _had_ put any thought into it, he probably wouldn’t have such weird, smooth, hairless arms or be subscribed to more podcasts than one human could feasibly listen to in the course of their lifetime. And, like, is this the wedding I imagined when I was six years old and playing Barbies in my bedroom? Also no, because my Barbie was in a polyamorous throuple with Magic Earring Ken and the GI Joe I stole from the boy that lived next door, and the world wasn’t really ready to recognise their love.”

Nathaniel tilts his head, completely lost.

“What I’m saying is, fuck divine intervention, or signs, or missing your moment, or even beginning to understand the depths of your own stupid expectations and emotions. Hector and I got married because Home Base has better health benefits than being a quasi-professional surfer. We’re at my wedding right now because I don’t like making a fuss but Hector does, and what I _am_ always down for is a good party. Things happen because you decide you’re going to do them. Together.” She eyes him sidewise. “That kind of fits into your whole little spiel about partners, right?”

“I suppose it does,” he agrees.

“Yeah. I’m like, romantic and stuff.” She jabs him in the side with her bony elbow. “Huh. I must be way higher than I thought,” she says, leaning forward suddenly, eyebrows halfway up her forehead while her eyes remain heavy lidded, “because I swear that’s your weird emotionally stunted robot boyfriend that’s discovered the stripper pole in the middle of the dance floor.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Nathaniel mutters under his breath, pushing to his feet.

“Wow, I take everything back,” Heather drawls after him. “You two are perfect for each other. Just, like… the exact same hot mess.”

Rebecca clocks him approximately ten seconds before he reaches her, her eyes going wide then narrowing in quick succession as she re-anchors her legs to the pole and claws herself upward, koala-style, correctly anticipating his irritated lunge.

“What are you doing?” he hisses, trying to grab at an ankle to tug her towards the ground. “You are… surprisingly good at that, but I’d really rather you didn’t do it while you’re me.”

She hoists herself even further up, out of his reach. “But your upper body strength is so much better than mine, and now I’ve got all this extra length to work with.”

“You’re going to rip my pants.”

Apparently conceding that particular point, she begrudgingly lets herself slide back down onto the platform, uncannily graceful considering how gangly she’s managed to look mostly the entire time she’s inhabited his body. Two hands still gripping the pole she stares at him, tight lipped. “What’s the matter? Feeling a little out of the loop? Upset that I kept my relationship with the pole a secret? That I didn’t bother to inform you that it’s a part of my _oeuvre?_ ”

“What?” He catches her as she wobbles off the edge of the podium, pushing her back upright when she tips and threatens to overbalance. “I mean, we probably could have incorporated it somewhere along the line, sure. But you’ve already more than demonstrated your flexibility, believe me. On multiple occasions.”

“Let me go,” she grunts, shrugging his hands off her. “I don’t need your help.”

He trails unsteadily after her as she stomps towards the bar, his high heels a poor match for her determination. “What has gotten into you? And where the hell have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“You know, I’ve been ruminating,” she says, whirling around to face him, “about our whole situation. I say we throw caution to the wind. Literally. Since this is that asshole’s fault to begin with.”

As if in protest at precisely that moment a hot gust of air swells through the reception area, overturning various place settings and sending the overhead strings of lights swinging with such force that Valencia’s unimpressed shriek carries over the sound of the music.

Nathaniel frowns. “What are you suggesting?”

“That maybe we should just tell everyone what’s happened, and go back to living our own lives. Because it’s been what, six days now? And nothing. Nada. I’m still you, you’re still me.” Her eyes are wide, manic. “I mean, how long do we keep up this ruse? How long before we just accept the fact that we’re stuck like this? Maybe we just cut our losses, you know. Heather and Hector get used to the fact that their housemate is now a lanky WASP, and you can go back to… whatever it is you had planned for your life without me in it. Good luck breaking the news to your dad that he now has a daughter, though, right?”

Dread starts to creep up his spine at her sudden descent into fatalism. They’re far enough away from mostly everyone else that her erratic gesticulating is drawing more bemused glances than anything, but the longer she barrels on, the wider she’s casting herself, the louder she’s getting.

“Rebecca, you need to ssh.”

“What, are you worried someone’s going to overhear? That they’re going to think you’re crazy?” She shrugs, throwing the full force of her long arms into the motion. “I don’t care anymore. I don’t. I don’t care about any of it.”

“Really. And what happened to your whole ‘taking responsibility, my actions have consequences’ schtick, hmm?”

“Whilst I am inhabiting the Airbnb of your body,” she begins, putting strong emphasis on both the _h_ and _t_ in _whilst,_ “I’m a white, straight male. There _are_ no consequences to my actions.” She lurches into the bar, righting herself to hold up two fingers to the bartender. “Tequila.”

She snatches up the first shot glass, downs it in one furious gulp, and when he hasn’t picked up the one she’d slid towards him quick enough for her liking she shrugs and reaches for that one too. “More for me,” she says, and he intercepts and takes it just so she won’t.

It burns on the way down, mixing unpleasantly with her words and the wine and liqueur already sitting heavy in his stomach. He doesn’t think he’s had tequila since—

“Tastes like Spring Break, huh?” Rebecca says, wincing and wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

Nathaniel just about jumps out of his skin when the hands wrap around his waist from behind.

“Rebecca,” Valencia says through gritted teeth, her tone simultaneously menacing and bright. “Why aren’t you and your beanstalk dancing? Why isn’t anyone dancing?”

Nathaniel falters. “Uh…”

“We’re on it,” Rebecca assures her quickly, looping an arm around Nathaniel’s to drag him back in the direction of the dance floor. “I get to lead,” she announces gruffly, as if she’s calling dibs. As if this dance they’ve been doing the entire time they’ve known each other has ever been led by anyone else.

Despite his mental scoffing, he still manages to get the hold all wrong, Rebecca having to reposition his hand from where he places it on her waist on autopilot. But then her left hand is curling around his right, her splayed palm too warm against the bare skin of his back. A determined shove from Valencia sees Paula and her husband reluctantly join them, and when Paula’s eyes land Nathaniel she presses her hand to her heart and mimes a dramatic coo in his direction. He makes himself offer her a weak smile in response.

His thoughts can’t help but turn back to where they’d strayed when he was talking to Heather—to the notion of _Rebecca and Nathaniel_ as it pertained to the other people in their lives, and the question of whether or not there was some kind of observer effect to come into play. He realises with an alarming jolt that this is the first time they’ve really appeared like this—together, in public, around people the two of them properly know. The masquerade was the obvious parallel to draw, but this time there were no masks, no cover afforded by a crowded room of for-the-most-part perfect strangers, and it stings him all the more to know it isn’t even real. Not that they’ve spent much of tonight in each other’s company.

Rebecca’s ongoing preoccupation is palpable; for someone that had seemed so delighted at the prospect of dancing and playing fancy dress earlier on, her spirits seem to have dampened considerably from the playful demeanour she’d been exhibiting only just this afternoon. When she hasn’t been avoiding him, he’s been hopelessly hard-pressed to get a read on her wildly shifting mood.

“Hey, are you okay?” he ventures, rubbing the shoulder seam of her jacket with his thumb. “I’ve barely seen you all night and you were very… agitated, back there.”

She’s watching Heather and Hector again, her soon-to-be-former housemate’s head tipped back in a snort as they trip over each others feet, their version of a waltz making up for all it lacks in technique with raucous laughter. There’s something wistful and forlorn in Rebecca’s face, and he wonders if she’s thinking now about her own failed wedding; the first dance she never got to have with Josh, and the father-daughter follow-up she never had with her deadbeat dad. The ex-fiancé in question is currently manning the DJ booth, and though Nathaniel’s relatively sure her sudden air of melancholy isn’t Josh Chan-centric, he can’t help but bristle at the possibility she’s pining for the flipflop she’d once so emphatically proclaimed was the man of her dreams.

Somewhere off to their left Heather and Hector sway precariously on the spot, barely holding each other upright as they extend their ring fingers in a performative wiggle for the camera, and Nathaniel doesn’t miss the way Rebecca’s grip on him tightens.

She shakes her head, looking down at him in delayed response, and there’s something cloudy in her expression that he still can’t put his finger on.

“What is it?”

“I just… I just really wish I was looking at _you_ , right now,” she says quietly, tugging him closer and tucking her face down into his shoulder.

His whole body goes loose as her arms constrict around him, pulling them flush, her breath coming in warm puffs against his skin and making him shiver.

Nathaniel’s never been much of a hugger, but with Rebecca it’s always felt something like second nature—even that very first time, after he’d flown in her dad and she’d caught him off guard, the way she’d pressed up on her tip toes to fling her arms around him. He’d had to keep one hand firmly in his pocket and clear his throat to gently suggest she disengage lest he find himself sinking into her the way he has every instance she’s hugged him since; it’s embarrassing, being able to be so easily deactivated, like some kind of docile kitten going limp as it’s lifted by the scruff of its neck. The metaphor tracks, if he’s being completely honest—though he’s loathe to admit it, regardless of whatever predator he’d once taken pride in identifying with he’s well aware that a few weeks playing house with Rebecca was all it had taken to awaken his inner domesticated cat, begrudgingly seeking companionship, dancing around her feet and begging for her every scrap.

All of her earlier frustrations seem to have abandoned her in favour of despondency, and he hates how he finds himself drawing comfort in her clinging to him.

After what seems like a small eternity, she pulls back, nose dragging up past his, pupils blown, eyes very firmly on the line of his mouth. He can feel every syllable fan out across his face as she strokes at his hip and murmurs, “Wanna go fool around in a dressing room?”

Then the pads of her fingers drag enticingly across the back of his hand, and his entire central nervous system short circuits.

* * *

They’re both drunk, silly off the tequila and champagne, and she wonders idly if Nathaniel’s adequately intoxicated to let go of his reflexive homophobia long enough to get her off with his mouth.

She doesn’t want to think about it, the way they somehow always seem to end up here—sneaking around, unable to keep their hands off each other, making up rules they never really try to follow. It’s overwhelming and confusing, the way Nathaniel’s body automatically contorts itself to be closer to her body; how his skin seeks out her skin and deep inside all that she longs for a different kind of closeness where instead of all the physical feedback, instead of all the crossed wires and mixed signals, she gets to know what he’s thinking, gets to _understand_. 

Her fingers fist in the fabric of his dress, dragging him closer, grabbing at him wherever she can, holding on. It takes him a second longer to catch up, somewhat of a passive party to start with but then he’s springing into action, stripping her of her jacket, unknotting her tie to get at her throat.

“Please tell me I’m going to find a condom in your wallet,” she mumbles against his collarbone, already patting around for her pocket. When she finally grabs a hold of the black leather there’s a foil packet tucked inside in the same hiding place she remembers, and it’s so incredibly apropos of them being locked inside a small room to get at each other that it hurts. “Good boy scout,” she breathes beneath his ear, latching on to the bottom of his lobe and sinking her teeth hard into the tissue.

When he guides her lips back to his the kiss is heady, desperate; he holds her against him like he’s suffocating and she’s his sole source of air. She knots her fingers through his curls and _pulls_ —she’s angry at him and she’s jealous of him and she needs to be inside of him as soon as humanly possible.

She tears her mouth away when the vanity hits the small of her back, gasping. “This might work better if we…”

“Yeah.”

He lets her twist them around until he’s the one with his back to the counter and then she’s lifting him by the thighs, hoisting, laughing breathlessly into his mouth at the absurdity of it all.

* * *

He hasn’t been able to help but be a little turned on all evening, how _good_ Rebecca’s body looks in the dress. 

Nathaniel’s not sure if it’s simply her small stature or a reaction with her medication or maybe he’s gotten her tolerance all wrong but every drop he’s had tonight has gone suddenly, maddeningly, completely to his head and then elsewhere, because of course, of _course_ Rebecca Bunch is a horny drunk.

_That speech,_ he tries to get out around the way his entire body’s trying to curl closer to where she’s put her mouth. _What did you mean by that,_ he wants to ask, but Rebecca doesn’t want to talk. Rebecca’s mouth is wrapped around the bud of his left breast, swollen pink and tight and aching with need, and when he feels teeth dragging over the sensitive peak he loses all command of rational thought.

He’s helpless to resist her, even like this.

The front of his dress is pulled down so that he’s spilling out of it, the cup of his bra bunched up below the breast. She snakes a hand up under the bundled up skirt to get at him, to rub him through his underwear, through the constricting layers of Spanx she made him wear, and when the fabric gathers just right to twist against his clit he groans and grinds down into her, his every overexcited molecule focused on maintaining that delicious source of friction.

Nathaniel’s almost reached the point where he’s able to kiss her without scrunching his eyes shut, and sometimes when he’s peeking he catches the way she’s looking at him, catches the way his face must look when it looks at her. He wants to tell her to stop, stop making his jaw go so slack and his eyes so soft and syrupy and blue, but he knows it isn’t her fault. He knows the way it’s been pre-programmed into him for awhile now, the disgusting longing and the reverence and the inability to tear himself away. That’s not how his face looks now, though—Rebecca is steely and determined, hyper-focused on her task, eyes narrowed and dark and pupils blown wide.

“Off,” she says, always so demanding, even breathless in his body, and a part of him wants to protest that it took so long to get them on. But other parts of him can’t help but be very, very interested in the promise of getting out of them, and his fingers are joining hers to roll them down, fumbling with the way they’ve sealed to him like horrible, second skin. 

“God, you’re such an asshole,” she says against his mouth, grabbing him roughly by the hips to pull him against her.

He wants to know what exactly he’s done to piss her off this time but he still can’t form the words because she’s pushing into him with one long, determined stroke that has his head cracking backwards against the door hard enough to hurt.

“Fuck,” he hisses, head still tipped back, panting.

His head is spinning from the alcohol and his collision with the door and the lights are stinging his eyes and the music is loud but muffled and he can’t believe this—can’t believe he’s drunk and half naked in a dress, being fucked up against a wall by Rebecca Bunch in his body in a bathroom at a wedding that isn’t even properly catered, his shoulders scraping against the enamel in the same jarring tempo as the dull thud of the b-grade DJ’s bass.

She’s rough, rougher than he ever remembers having been with her.

They’ve had their fair share of frantic couplings, and the night before they found themselves in this whole mess especially he’d been inclined to work some of his frustrations out on her. He’s never proven particularly good at it, though—something in his brain tends to short circuit, to default back to worshipful the second he finds himself lucky enough to have her in his arms. Rebecca doesn’t seem to have the same issue, the every snap of her hips into his angry and demanding and desperate.

She bites his shoulder as she comes and despite the heavy petting earlier, despite how worked up he’s been the entire evening he doesn’t get there, the frustration thrumming along every inch where they’re still joined as she twitches and holds herself still and buried to the hilt inside of him. She doesn’t reach between them to touch him and he’s too dazed to do it himself so he just lets her keep him pinned against the door, feeling the elusive wave of his release recede and ebb away.

The noise from the party filtering in from under the door below them sounds faraway; like they’re underwater, in a bubble, the only truly distinguishable sound their laboured breathing. Rebecca buries her head in the crook of his shoulder and stays there, large hands still spanning his hips.

Between the alcohol, the heels and the tremor in his thighs he can barely stand when she finally sets him down, wobbling back and forth between her body and the wall. The intoxication had numbed the discomfort earlier but a dull throbbing pain has started to make its presence known in his ankles, leaving him as physically off-kilter as he feels, and Rebecca won’t look at him, all her resolute flirtatiousness gone. Instead she seems deflated, uneasy, and the whole confusing encounter leaves him nauseated.

“I want to go home,” she says quietly, hands shaking as she pulls up her pants. “We should… we should go.”

Pulse still hammering at every point where it surfaces in his skin, he stumbles on unsteady legs to stoop and gather his discarded undergarments, tugging his dress down and wincing at the way she’s left him hollow—primed and empty, body still slick for a release that didn’t come.

It doesn’t sound like an intimation for continuation, but just in case it is he slides his hand alongside hers in the Uber, grazing pinkies, trying for his best approximation of seductive given the circumstances, the way his skull feels like it’s packed to the brim with cotton wool. His mouth makes up for the lack of clear thought in its demands; he’s thirsty, and he’s starving, and his intoxicated tongue wants to be back tracing the seam of Rebecca’s lips, to remind itself of how she tastes. _You’re my person_ , he wants to whisper, to breathe deep into her lungs, the alcohol only amplifying the certainty of it outwards. _You’re my person and I thought you should know._

Rebecca doesn’t seem to share his mood, pulling her palm away from his and back into her lap, the side of her face pressed up against the window. He swallows down on his impulses, squirming in his seat and busying himself with unscrewing the cap off the complimentary water bottle, chugging down a good two thirds of it in one go.

They don’t speak the entire ride back to his apartment.

“Are you okay?” he asks again once they’ve stumbled across the threshold, kicking off his shoes with an appreciative grunt and still squinting under the glare of the lights. “Because you’ve been kind of off all night, and I know it sucks that you didn’t get to give your speech and—”

Rebecca’s answering laugh is bitter as she drops down onto the end of the bed. “You think this is about the stupid speech?”

Dipping to massage an abused ankle, he contorts himself to look up at her, features twisting in confusion. Balanced as he is on one foot—the joint just as sore, and still pickling in champagne—he has to throw an arm out against the wall to narrowly avoid toppling over and falling flat on his face.

“I spoke to your dad, Nathaniel. And let’s just say you hadn’t exactly prepared me for how that particular conversation was going to go.”

His heart sinks and shrivels—starts to feel too small in his chest. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I know about the demerger,” she says, eyes wide and accusing as she crosses her arms over her chest. “I know you’re leaving town and you said _nothing_.”

He swallows and straightens, and he’s suddenly never felt more sober.

* * *

“I know it’s because of me.”

Nathaniel’s eyes flutter shut in resignation. “Rebecca—”

“What, were you just going to let me come into work one day and find all your stuff gone? The way you moved out of the office and didn’t tell me? You’re a fucking coward, Nathaniel.”

She stalks away from him, yanking off her tie, fingers fumbling with the buttons on the dress shirt as she goes. 

It’s there, again—the fuzzy sensation that doesn’t know what to do with the way she feels about him, the one that can’t quite decide which therapy-mandated box all their baggage belongs in. Every time she thinks she’s close, it seems like she unearths something else to toss onto the pile to change the indefinable weight of what they carry, of what they owe each other to figure out.

If he has an excuse it doesn’t seem like he’s ready for her to hear it, the way he hovers guilty and silent in the entryway, wide eyes full of self-reproach. That’s fine, she realises with startling clarity; for all the confusing mess of insecurities and quiet desperation she’s been clinging to all evening, something takes shape and solidifies inside her now.

“I need you to go,” she says, the words coming out before she can properly consider them, her voice low but unwavering.

He laughs nervously. “Rebecca, come on.”

“I’m serious. Get out.”

“What? This is my apartment.”

She widens her eyes at him. “Not right now it isn’t. Get _out_.”

Scooping up the purse he’d dropped on the bench by the entrance and thrusting it at him, she takes him by the shoulders and steers him out into the corridor. “I’m not going to burn it down, if that’s what you’re wondering,” she calls after him as he stumbles, bewildered and barefoot, down the hallway with the propulsion from her shove. “Might help you pack, though. If I’m feeling magnanimous.”

Someone a few doors down yells at her to shut up, and she makes a rude hand gesture in their general direction before slamming back inside.

She clicks on the television only to growl in frustration at the sight of the weatherman, the scroll bar at the bottom mockingly proclaiming _Santa Ana winds show no sign of easing._

The remote hits the wall so hard it takes a chunk out of the plaster.

“What the _hell_ do you want from me, asshole?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> credit for nathaniel being a dummy about needing glasses must be given to [this delightful headcanon post,](https://ourmanifestoisfun.tumblr.com/post/172330774172/random-things-that-would-irrationally-delight-me) because I haven't been able to stop thinking about the hilarity of that scenario since.


	8. your body never lies

His eyes feel like they’re glued together, and he blames the mascara.

The headache, on the other hand, he can only attribute to the alcohol, and he runs his tongue around his mouth trying to generate the saliva to clear out the stale taste it’s left behind.

He’s pretty sure someone is watching him, and when he finally manages to peel an eye open—seemingly ripping out every last one of his eyelashes in the process—it’s to find Heather towering over where he’s sprawled out on the couch in Rebecca’s living room.

She’s still wearing her vintage table cloth party dress, and from his awkward angle he can’t help but notice it barely skims the top quarter of her seemingly endless legs. Nathaniel’s not used to being loomed over—at least not in a physical sense, and by anyone other than his father—and he frowns, uncomfortable with the blocking of this particular scene but not yet enough in control of his faculties yet to make any attempts to remedy it.

“Where did you and lover boy run off to?” Heather asks, arms crossed and tone vaguely suspicious. “Nobody even saw you leave.”

His argument with Rebecca comes rushing back to him in nauseating, heady Technicolor, and he swallows down the physical compulsion to dry heave.

Heather’s still waiting for an explanation, and he can’t help but flinch at the unwavering stare that won’t quite decipher, into accusation or otherwise. “Yeah. Sorry. We, um… we had a pretty big fight,” he says, his mouth feeling like cotton wool. He tries to kick his brain into gear, still reaching for the hard sell. “I didn’t want to ruin your night with my drama.”

Heather’s posture relaxes into something hinting at sympathetic, but he’s still hard pressed to get a read. She reaches over to pat him awkwardly on the head. “There there, kiddo.”

He imagines himself sitting up, but his body goes nowhere.

“I told V and Beth they could take your bed since you didn’t seem to be coming home, but then an Uber dropped you off a few hours ago,” Heather tells him, glancing towards the hallway. “You were not wearing shoes. So, that was classy.”

As if awakened by the mere reminder, his ankles throb with a painful one-two twinge. “That’s me,” is all he manages. “What time is it?”

“Four a.m.”

He squints. “And why are we awake?”

In lieu of a reply, Heather slides forward and catches him completely off guard when she starts awkwardly climbing over him to squeeze between him and the back of the couch, her bare skin heated at every point it butts up against his own. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, freezing.

“Comforting you, obviously,” she says, pulling a face as she slips an arm around his waist, drawing their bodies flush. She digs her chin into his shoulder. “You know what I’m like with personal space, and I’m pretty sure this is ninety percent me still being buzzed from earlier so like, don’t make it weird or I’ll ditch you immediately.”

Heather smells like hemp moisturiser and cheap beer he supposes must have been spilled on her at some point during the evening’s festivities. 

“Shouldn’t you be with your husband? Honeymooning, or something?”

“Oh, being with me _is_ the honeymoon,” she deadpans. “Hector knows that.”

The toilet flushes, and Valencia appears in the door to the kitchen, crossing her arms and arching a perfect eyebrow at them. “What are you doing?”

“Comforting Rebecca,” Heather says, as if that should be obvious, “because her boyfriend is a douche canoe.”

“I see,” Valencia says, and her tone sounds entirely skeptical but next minute she’s tightening the belt on her robe and clambering on top of them, pressing Nathaniel even further down into the couch with a protesting _oof_.

“Or killing her,” he grunts, voice muffled from where his face is smooshed against the cushion.

“Are you critiquing our comfort giving?” Heather asks. “That’s a bold move, coming from the small person at the bottom of the puppy pile.”

After a second, though, Valencia sighs and slips forward, forgoing their horizontal pyramid in favour of something more closely resembling a human sandwich, with Nathaniel trapped awkwardly in the middle. He’s relieved and still uncomfortable in equal measure.

“You smell kinda nasty,” Heather observes after awhile, gingerly inspecting a lock of his hair. “Were you hate-fucking your canoe before you came here?”

“In the dressing room at your wedding,” he corrects, his impending hangover and Rebecca’s body banding together in what he supposes is only an in-character complete removal of filter.

Heather drops the limp curl like it’s contagious.

“Gross, Rebecca,” Valencia mumbles, which is exactly how he feels. “Next time take a shower. Everybody else shouldn’t have to bathe in the scent of your bad decisions.”

Heather reaches across him to flick Valencia on the elbow, and he’s only vaguely aware of Hector covering them with a blanket a stretch of minutes later.

His eyes start to prick and he’d like to blame it on the handy scapegoat of Rebecca’s hormones but he knows that’s not the only reason. He’s hit with an overwhelming sense of melancholy for Rebecca; for how safe and secure this scrap heap of female solidarity should be making her feel right now instead of him. She should be the one living up every last second with her girl mob, or whatever it is they like to call it—instead she’s stuck sulking in his apartment, alone, smarting from the sting of his first betrayal and unaware he still has to deliver another. The guilt twists at his insides, starting with his stomach and squeezing right up into his lungs.

Underneath all that, though—he’s never felt so lonely in his life.

* * *

Her back wakes up before the rest of her, singing its protests in the form of a sharp pain splintering up the lower length of her spine where it’s dipped and fallen down between the couch cushions she’d clumsily wrapped in a blanket the night before. She makes to roll over, to relieve herself of the stiffness, but that only amplifies the discomfort so she falls still, her head slowly but steadily pounding its way into consciousness.

By the time she manages to pull herself upright against the frame of the couch, the pounding has blossomed into a jagged staccato of a headache, winding its corkscrew vice-grip deep into her temples. In retrospect, resigning herself to a night not-quite on Nathaniel’s floor hadn’t exactly been the best of ideas, but the bed hadn’t felt like an option at the height of her maelstrom of conflicting emotions. 

Even in the slew of discarded bedding, Nathaniel’s apartment still feels frustratingly immaculate. It’s looking slightly more lived-in than usual, of course—there’s the peppering of cosmetics on his bathroom counter, several pairs of her shoes alongside his at the door. The disgustingly domestic smatterings of their respective lives reluctantly strewn together in such a convincing way that any outsider would be hard-pressed to question the co-habitation, and left alone and to her own maddening devices, she finds herself desperate to overturn it, upturn it, turn it upside down and inside out until there’s no neat places left for him to hide. How many weeks, she wants the space to tell her. How many weeks since he’d known this was no longer going to be his home.

She side-eyes his laptop where it rests on the coffee table alongside hers.

She’s been using it intermittently all week but it’s never occurred to her to go searching until now—the not-long-buried, Paula-refined impulse itching at her fingertips, and now she knows exactly what the look for, it doesn’t take her long. The evidence is all there in his emails, and she drinks in every emotionless, electronic correspondence with his father, catching each implication that’s insinuated itself in between the lines until she finds herself at the message that had given her pause only days earlier, but what seems like a lifetime ago.

She reads the HR inquiry over and over until the white of the screen burns her eyes and the words start to rearrange and blur together, and her gaze shifts reluctantly to Nathaniel’s nightstand.

* * *

“You know a starfish’s mouth is in the centre of its body? So all those cartoon mermaids wearing them for bras… I’m just saying.”

Nathaniel startles at the sound of Heather’s voice, grimacing and shielding his already-tender breasts on an unconscious reflex. “That’s disgusting.”

He straightens up from where he’s sat himself glumly in front of the tank on Rebecca’s counter, oddly transfixed by the silent, unmoving sea star within. It can’t speak, so it can’t yell at him, or expect answers he can’t give, making it somewhat preferable company to Rebecca or her friends at present. 

Still, he can’t help feeling like it’s judging him.

Heather’s hairline is still damp and fuzzy from her shower, and he hates her a little bit for looking a hundred times more refreshed than he felt after his. Valencia and Beth had long-ago departed for their post-mortem at the venue, and Heather had tried to needle him into meeting them for lunch with her afterwards, but he’d declined in favour of nursing his nastily persistent hangover over a cup of coffee and a bagel Hector had cheerfully slid in his direction that he’s still mostly failed to touch.

Heather tips her head in a way that suggests she doesn’t entirely disagree with his horrified assessment of her factoid. “Hey. I’ve actually been meaning to ask you a favour,” she says, leaning against the refrigerator. “Do you maybe want to take official custody of Estrella? She and Hector don’t get along, and she totally thinks moving to El Segundo is selling out.”

Nathaniel blinks at her, both weary and wary. “You want me—Rebecca—to look after a living thing?”

Heather shrugs. “It’s not that hard. Plus, you’ve basically been staring into her soul for the last two hours, so I think the two of you have sufficiently bonded. You can be attentive when you want to be.”

His gaze slides back to the tank. He’s always loved aquariums—found the cool glow and the gentle hum of the filter relaxing, before you even began to factor in the marine life—but he’s admittedly unsure where Rebecca stands. 

“I’ve always wanted a pet,” he finds himself saying.

“And I feel like one that can’t run away when you inevitably get distracted and leave the door open is definitely a good place for you to start,” Heather says with a small smile.

* * *

“What do you think of these?” 

The cashier glances up from his magazine, eyes flicking hesitantly to the door before landing back on her face. She shrugs, her chewing gum smacking with carefully cultivated obnoxiousness. “They look good. Great, even.”

Rebecca hums, unconvinced. “These?”

“A fine alternative.”

She sighs, hoping to convey she’s unimpressed with the level of detail being provided in the feedback.

“You know what? I’ll just take them all. I can afford it. And these,” she adds, swiping a couple of packets of crisps off the counter and adding them to her pile. “Yeah. Just… all of this.”

She tosses the two shopping bags worth of wares into the passenger seat of Nathaniel’s car and rifles through one of them to select a pair of glasses at random, reaching up to adjust the rearview mirror so as to better be able to inspect the way they complement her face. Once she opens the crisps the first trial pair get discarded on the grounds she accidentally gets her greasy fingerprints all over the glass.

Eventually settling on a style she likes with dark tortoiseshell rims, she pulls out Nathaniel’s phone and starts flicking through the contacts, making a vindicated grunt of satisfaction at the way the words are somewhat sharper on the screen.

She considers using her own account to add Nathaniel to the Mountaintop group chat—much to what would most likely be the immediate dismay of all of her colleagues—then thinks better of it, not wanting the object of her irritation to be on the receiving end of the messages while he’s still in possession of her phone. So she settles for starting her own, sans her own number, entitling it _Newsflash: I’m nice now_ and punctuating with a simple smiling face emoji to help sweeten the deal.

_Who’s free for lunch? My shout._

She frowns when Tim and Maya leave her on read.

_This feels like a trap_ , Jim writes back a few minutes later.

_Definitely not a trap_ , she insists, to no immediate avail.

Her fingers rap impatiently on the console. Nathaniel’s phone remains conspicuously silent.

* * *

Darryl’s daughter makes an immediate grab for her gas station reading glasses, and the man in question quickly angles his body away to keep her chubby hands from making contact. “Can I just say I am _loving_ the new eyewear—very slick, very studious. Very _To Kill A Mockingbird._ ”

“Really? Because I was thinking more Hugh Grant in _Four Weddings and Funeral,_ ” Rebecca says, adjusting their position on the bridge of her nose.

“Well, now that you say it,” Darryl says, throwing up his free hand. “That’s all I can see.”

She hums noncommittally as they slide into a booth, Darryl shifting Hebby to prop her up between his stomach and the edge of the table, her attention quickly shifting to the condiments lying just out of reach in lieu of her earlier proximity to Rebecca’s face.

“Thanks for meeting me, Darryl,” she says as she flips open the menu. “I just really needed to get out of the house, you know? See some different faces.”

“I know _exactly_ what you mean,” Darryl agrees with a wholly unnecessary eye roll of enthusiasm. “You should try being couped up with a baby watching cartoons all day. It’s such a relief to speak to somebody in something other than rhymes and lullabies.”

“Yeah, about that—I thought you were leaving the kid with a sitter?”

Darryl had been far from her first choice in people she’d like to spend her Saturday with, and the addition of his progeny-that-was-technically-her-biological-offspring to the equation didn’t exactly improve his prospects as a candidate. Still, all of her other work friends had remained understandably wary of her offer of lunch plans, and beggars, she knew all too well, could not be choosers.

“I was, but then she had something come up last minute and I felt bad after leaving Hebby for so long last night, what with the wedding and all. Besides, she’s no trouble—look, all she wants to do is watch.”

To her credit, the child hasn’t made a peep since they arrived, content with plucking intermittently at Darryl’s tie and gazing wide-eyed around at the hustle and bustle of Home Base lunch hour. Rebecca scrutinises her for a moment, taking in her oversized blue eyes and the thin dusting of brown hair plastered across her scalp, searching for any obvious sign that half of Hebby's chromosomes had come from her. She comes up empty, for the most part—she kind of just looks like a baby. 

“Is Rebecca busy with Paula and the girls?” Darryl asks, knowingly. “I know it’s easy to feel lost when your significant other is doing things without you. When Josh used to teach a night class at the gym on Thursdays I would always feel a little excluded, but I had to remind myself—it’s _women’s_ body pump, and he’d let me sign up if he could.” Darryl shifts in his seat, rolling his shoulders before adding sotto voce, “There were some complaints, after the first time.”

“You know what I would just love, Darryl?” Rebecca asks, plastering a smile on her face and extending a fist to bump him lightly on the shoulder. “If we could just… not talk about Rebecca. Or White Josh. Or Heather’s wedding. Or babies,” she adds, just as he’s opening his mouth.

Darryl’s mouth snaps sulkily shut into a performative pout. “I feel like you’ve taken a lot of topics off the table. Is there anything I _am_ allowed to talk about?”

He has a point, she realises begrudgingly. She considers reaching for the most in-character option—work—but that’s possibly even more of a contentious issue for her right now than the others.

She smooths out the crease running through the entree page of her menu. “Let’s just order some lunch, shall we?”

* * *

She considers ignoring Nathaniel for the rest of the weekend.

She considers other things, too—things like rearranging his bookshelf to be organised by colour rather than alphabetically, or replacing all his button downs with Hawaiian shirts, or getting his body a lower back tattoo that says _corporate piece of trash_ in a fun, cursive font; things that she always makes sure stop just shy of arson—but by the time 8pm rolls around, she can’t stop picking up his phone and letting her thumb hover over her own name in the contact list. 

Her half-day with Darryl had only driven home the point that no matter their feelings towards each other—messy or otherwise—their current situation left them uniquely limited as long as they were caught up in playing reluctant custodians to each other’s lives. 

He hasn’t tried calling or texting, which is unusual for him—if she scrolls back far enough on her own phone she can still read the endless slew of messages he’d sent her after her failed wedding, after the masquerade, after she’d insulted everyone she cared about and run away. Far more recently, after their disagreement on her porch the day she’d been released from jail. He’s always been the one pursuing her, pleading, while she’s been the one deigning to throw him the occasional bone. She’s never really had that before, she realises—had someone so readily relinquish the emotional upper hand. It doesn’t stop every letter she types from being a razor sharp paper cut to her pride. 

_Can you come back to the apartment? We need to talk._

She sucks in a breath when the flashing ellipses appear, then disappear just as suddenly.

Nothing. He doesn’t type back.

She tosses his phone down the couch with a growl, irritated at herself for caving only to have him act smug. Like he had any right to be annoyed with her. The grievance was hers, and if this fight was going to be on anyone’s terms, they certainly weren’t going to be his.

She’s halfway to the exit, the jagged metal of his keys cutting into her palm where she grips them too tight when the lock on the front door jiggles then unlatches, the wood nudging open to reveal an ashen-faced Nathaniel. There’s a fishbowl cradled in his arms, and bobbing at the centre of it is a plastic baggie holding—

“Is that _Estrella_?” she asks, ire momentarily forgotten as her face screws up in confusion. 

“It is.” Nathaniel tucks the fishbowl further into his side, defensive. “Heather gave her to me. She’s mine now.”

“You mean she gave her to me,” Rebecca corrects, eyebrows raised.

“Were you there?” 

He steps into the apartment and closes the door behind him, his eyes lingering on her face and mouth flattening into an irritated thin line when he takes in her glasses. Still, he refuses to rise to the bait, crossing the living room to set the tank down on the coffee table, at which point his stubborn refusal to comment on her new accessory snags and snares on something in the far side of the room.

He stares at the bed. “What the hell is that?”

* * *

Rebecca plants her hands firmly on her hips. “I had some free time on my hands so I decided to redecorate my space.”

It takes him a second, but he starts to absorb all the subtle changes in his periphery; ignoring the ridiculous spectacles she’s now sporting, the apartment is littered with new additions—a vase filled with fresh flowers by the window, brightly coloured cushions scattered across the couch—but his gaze remains fixed on the most obvious one; where his bed was once outfitted in sensible shades of grey, she’s replaced his linens with a rich maroon bedspread that looks suspiciously as if it’s covered with—

“Hippogriffs? Really? Where did you even get that?”

“Pottery Barn,” she says, without missing a beat.

He frowns. “Approximately how high a credit card bill should I be anticipating?”

She only juts her chin up at him defiantly.

“Can you take those off? I can’t take you—or rather myself—seriously while you’re wearing them.”

To his surprise, Rebecca removes the glasses without argument, folding them neatly and dropping them on the coffee table beside Estrella before turning and arching an eyebrow at him as if to say, _See? I can be reasonable_.

Neither of them speaks, remaining instead in a sullen standoff by the entryway until Nathaniel sighs and Rebecca relents at approximately the same time.

“Rebecca—”

“You weren’t going to tell me?”

He’s caught off guard by the way her words are laced with profound hurt, rather than the anger he was expecting from the night before. “I never had the chance! Apart from you showing up to my apartment in the middle of the night to literally screw me and leave, we weren't talking, remember? And since then we’ve kind of had some other stuff going on.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. How many conversations have we had this week? You could have slipped it into any one of them.”

Rebecca’s body sweats when it’s nervous, and he feels himself growing clammy.

He doesn’t bother defending himself. Doesn’t bother trying to explain how he’d tried to tell her that night in his apartment when she’d joked about marrying him, tried to tell her all of it—not just about the firm but what her friends had said to him at Sugar Face. He still doesn’t know how. Doesn’t know how to break it to her not-entirely gently, the irreverent but empathetic way Heather could have done, or with Valencia’s apologetic squeeze.

“Your friends are leaving,” he blurts out instead, cringing immediately at his own emotional ineptitude. 

“What?”

“Heather’s moving out and Valencia’s moving to New York. That’s what happened at lunch the other day,” he says. “They’re leaving, and I didn’t know how to tell you that I might be leaving too.”

He doesn't want to tell her it was because he couldn’t stand the idea of her indifference.

Rebecca sinks down onto the couch, shaking her head slowly as if to dispel the unpleasant knowledge he’s just bequeathed her. “No, Heather and Valencia aren’t leaving,” she says with a breathy laugh of denial. “I’d know if they were thinking about leaving. They would have told me. They wouldn’t both be leaving.” She looks up at him, and her expression hardens. “You wouldn’t all be leaving.”

Her gaze shifts to the starfish, floating in the waterlogged bag behind glass, and he can see the exact moment the reality of it hits her.

“They’re really both going?” she whispers.

“I’m sorry.”

She shakes her head again, and the motion starts out small until it grows almost manic, like she’s trying to dislodge the very thought of it from her brain. “ _You’re_ sorry? Fuck you.”

“What was I supposed to say, Rebecca?” he asks hopelessly. 

“I don’t know, something along the lines of, ‘hey—just a heads up that my dad thinks you’re a wily temptress that’s seduced me into brand new levels of stupidity previously thought unattainable’, maybe. Or, ‘he can’t handle the idea of me playing slightest second string to a _woman_ , let alone a woman that’s been in the mental ward _and_ prison, blah blah blah, optics, probably’. And, ‘now he’s dragging me out by the scruff off my neck and I’m too much of a daddy’s boy to argue otherwise.’ That would have just about covered it.”

He swallows and turns away when he feels his eyes stinging with the salt of unshed tears. “Yeah. I guess that would’ve.”

Two minutes ago he would have taken her righteous anger over the deeply wounded look she’s carved into every inch of his own face, but now it’s rushing back with the same needle-sharp clarity from the night before he can barely stand that either, his stomach squeezing itself into uncomfortable shapes and making him seasick from the motion.

“For what it’s worth, I feel horrible. I haven’t eaten all day. I barely made it off the couch. All I’ve been able think about is what an idiot I’ve been—every stupid thing I’ve said, or not said, to you these past few weeks. Months, even. And the only explanation I have is that I thought…” He trails off, squeezing his eyes closed as a heady wave of embarrassment tries to wash away his admission before he can get the words out. “I thought it would be easier on the both of us. That you’d made your feelings clear.”

She doesn’t respond, turning her head to stare out of the window into the night rather than look at him.

“You know what I want, Rebecca,” he says quietly. “I think I’ve made that… embarrassingly apparent. And if it’s different to what you want, that’s fine. But we don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to moving on. And you are just as guilty of that as me.”

Some of the fight visibly sags out of her at that, her shoulders dropping as if the skeleton itself is collapsing under the collective weight of everyone and everything that’s ever disappointed her. Even trapped in his body, she manages to look suddenly small.

“I just…” She takes a deep, shuddering breath, screwing her eyes shut as if to will away the accompanying emotion. When she opens them again it’s like he’s not seeing his own face at all—just Rebecca, wild and distraught and open, shrugging hopelessly inside his impossible frame. “Everyone always leaves. I guess I should just be used to that by now, right?” 

And that’s the crux of the matter, really—the thing he _knew_ without ever wanting to put it into words for himself, the way he’s never been able to cope with the idea of being comparable to her father, not since that day on the cliffside when he’d been forced to confront the confusing consequences of his own uncharacteristic good intentions in having brought him to her, in _making him show up_ only for him to let her down all over again. The truth is, since the moment she’d hugged him for the first time—thrown herself up onto her tiptoes in the middle of the bullpen, and pressed her body unexpectedly against his—a part of him found itself electrified, rewired with the interminable impulse for her to never feel let down again.

This isn’t the first time he’s failed, but it is the first time he’s been wholly cognisant of the fact he could do better.

“Lie down,” he says, before he can properly process what he’s saying.

Rebecca’s eyes shoot up her forehead. “Excuse me?”

“Lie down. On your stomach. Chop, chop,” he says, gesturing to his bed. “Off you go.”

“Is this some kind of a sex thing? Because now’s not really the—”

“Just do it—please?”

Something in his voice must implore to her because she only stews in her reluctance a few seconds longer before obeying, climbing up onto the dark red covers on her knees and flattening forwards, stretching up towards the bedhead and twisting her head to the side to look at him in confusion. He hesitates for a moment, still trying to untangle the mess of their own blended instincts inside of him before he’s climbing awkwardly over the top of her, fitting his tiny body along the length of hers.

She grunts. “Dude, what the fu—”

“Be quiet,” he says, frowning. “I’m… I’m trying to do something, here.”

For the first minute or so she fidgets—rolling her shoulders, adjusting her limbs, straightening her spine. But then she settles and he feels her breathing even out, the rise and fall of her ribcage deep and slow and regulated.

“Is this comforting?” he ventures. “It’s supposed to be comforting.”

“I mean, it’s confusing, more than anything. But I guess it feels kind of nice—like one of those weighted anxiety blankets, only person-shaped?”

“Yeah,” he says, thinking back to the press of Heather and Valencia’s bodies over his. “I guess it is kind of like that.”

He’s never been the biggest fan of being touched, but it’s not like Rebecca had ever left him with much choice in the matter. A few short weeks of her body being enthusiastically draped over his at every offered opportunity had quickly changed his assertion from it being a firmly harboured dislike to something long-denied transformed into an irrevocably acquired taste. There were eight long months of evidence of his uncontrollable craving for physical contact as some kind of farcical substitute for intimacy and affection.

“Can I ask you something?” he rasps, turning his head to the side to avoid being muffled by Rebecca’s back.

“Mmm?”

“Are you really just angry that I didn’t tell you, or are you upset because you don’t want me to go?”

She’s silent for a long time and then she’s shifting beneath him, shaking him loose. Allowing himself to be dislodged, he rolls onto the mattress beside her, his hand encircling her wrist to beg her to stay. He lets the breath ease out of him when she nudges him over, arm sliding around his waist to toy with the hem of his shirt, dragging it through the nails of her forefinger and thumb.

“Of course I don’t want you to go, you fucking asshole _,”_ she whispers, burying her face in his neck, too proud to say it any louder or to his face.

* * *

“A shame spiral,” she says after awhile, so softly he’s not entirely convinced he’s not hearing things.

“Hmm?”

He hadn’t been sleeping, exactly—more like drifting, and letting his mind go loose. All the nauseating tension that had been coiling tightly inside of him the entire day they’d spent apart was being lulled by the tentative reassurance of Rebecca’s presence behind him, comforted by the fact she’d yet to kick him out a second time.

“What you were feeling, this morning—you were having a shame spiral. It’s this thing I do sometimes, when I feel like I’ve fucked everything up. Which is a lot, honestly, so. I can relate.” She fidgets beside him on the mattress, sinking her top teeth into the soft skin of her lower lip. “There wasn’t a whole song and dance involved, was there?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, I think I took that with me. While I was redecorating I was rocking out to a Bon Jovi inspired number in my head, courtesy of your super cute rock chic PJs.”

He rolls his eyes. “Again—I don’t even know where you _found_ that.”

“Oh please, do not act like I unearthed it from a padlocked chest in the far corner of your family home attic—it was hanging in the side of your closet right beside that shirt of yours I hate, with the little white polka dots.”

“The blue one? What’s wrong with it?”

She averts her gaze, clearing her throat. “The, uh… the buttonholes are too narrow,” she says quietly. “It was always such a hassle to undo.”

He feels dry air hit the sweat on the nape of his neck when she shuffles away from him to stretch out flat on her back, and he hesitantly takes it as an excuse to roll onto his other side to face her.

“God, I just… hate you sometimes,” she says, wrapping her absurdly long arms around her middle and tipping her head back to exhale at the ceiling. “I hate you for messing things up. That’s _my_ thing. I don’t like it when other people try to do it for me.”

“I’m sorry,” he says with sincerity. “I know we’ve been careless with each other in the past. Misguided. Angry. But I’ve never…” 

Their tendency towards petulance with each other had a lot to do with the unintended forcefulness of their feelings, and their shared capacity for denial and all-too-easily-wounded pride has never, not once, made things any easier on either of them.

He blinks back the moisture, swallows down the tightness in his throat. “I want you to be happy.”

Before he ever even started to properly comprehend what _happy_ meant and how he could apply it to himself, he’d known he wanted it for her.

It had been almost pathetic, how suddenly and completely helpless he had found himself to her every whim, the progression from commandeering the family jet to being on the cusp of committing actual murder alarmingly swift. So he gets it—gets that maybe blindly tripping over yourself to fulfil the idea of what someone needs you to be and being willing to go to concerning lengths to please them isn’t great. The thing is, when he looks at Rebecca, when he’s with her, he doesn’t see any of the things standing in their way. And maybe that’s a problem, maybe it isn’t the healthiest way to feel, but he refuses to believe he isn’t in some way better off for it. 

_I want to make you as happy as you make me._

Her hand trails down from his shoulder to pick at the collar of his nightshirt. “How sorry are we talking? Like, are we in sympathy blow job territory yet, or…?”

The warmth that sits inside of him at a low simmer whenever they’re this close pulses not unpleasantly despite the circumstances, all too easily swayed by her pervasive tendency towards the sexual, but his primary response is relief that she’s let her guard down enough to joke with him.

“I should have told you. All of it.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “You should have.”

Her tone has a degree of finality to it, like she’s tired and she’s done talking about it, but he can’t help it—can’t help but cling to the fact that she’s not completely shutting him out, and the idea of letting her stew in silence makes him anxious.

“Heather’s starting to pack tomorrow,” he says, in the interest of total transparency. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to be there, but I can tell her I’ve bullied you into doing some heavy lifting. You know, as penance for how much of an asshole you’ve— _I’ve_ —been. And I know how much you enjoy lifting things now.”

She pats him absently on the chest with the back of her hand in acknowledgement. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

He lets himself take the hint.

His mind starts to wander away from him again and he thinks from the gentle chuffs of her breath she’s already fallen asleep beside him, so he fumbles across her for his phone to shut off all the lights, freezing when she stirs and twists to look at him, feeling pinned by the dull weight of her gaze, even in the dark.

“Nathaniel?”

“Mm?”

“What if we never change back?” she asks quietly. “Like, at what point am I allowed to just tell your dad to go fuck himself? Because I don’t want to leave.”

_This isn’t real_ , he thinks, scrunching his eyes shut. _Nothing about this can be considered remotely real._

He edges blindly closer to her on the mattress, until his body butts up against hers and his nose bumps into her cheek. Her hand comes up to rest on his hip, fisting in the thin fabric of the sweats that he's wearing, tugging him infinitesimally closer and surprising him with the firm press of her forehead against his own.

“I don’t want to leave either,” he says, hoarsely, and his lungs start to burn as he crosses the final millimetres to fit his mouth to hers.


	9. our bodies are fallible and flawed

The first thing she notices when she stirs is how quiet it is.

It’s still warm, though not unpleasantly so, the press of another body against hers bearable as an extra source of body heat. There’s a dull glow disturbing her even through the thickness of her eyelids, and she frowns and burrows away from it, wanting to hold onto the strange stillness left in the space where the steady whooshing of palm trees in the wind had persistently been prior, to take advantage of the break in the gentle-but-noticeable-enough-to-be-annoying rattling of the windows within their frames and slip back into sleep.

“Hey, the winds are gone,” she mumbles, nose twitching and tickling him where it’s pressed into his armpit.

“Yeah,” Nathaniel says, and still half asleep as she is, she doesn’t quite register she’s hearing it in his voice and not her own.

* * *

Nathaniel wakes up first.

He’s pulled from slumber by Rebecca’s chocolate coloured curls tickling his nose, and when he peels back an eyelid to investigate he freezes when he realises it’s not his head they’re connected to anymore but hers, her sleepy scrunched-up pout half-buried in his shoulder.

His stomach somersaults and then crashes, hard.

Not convinced he’s not dreaming, he scrubs a fist across his eyes, screwing them shut again only to blink them cautiously open to be greeted by the same sight—Rebecca’s body, no longer inhabited by his consciousness, half-draped over the side of his—and every hair on his body prickles to disbelieving attention. 

For a moment he holds himself perfectly still, almost terrified to breathe lest he find himself suddenly switched back. Once it becomes apparent he’s probably safe to exhale, he starts cycling through a vast array of emotions— confusion, bewilderment, overwhelming relief—and then sets about taking cautious stock of his body. He brings his hand up to wriggle each of his fingers, readjusting to their renewed length. His toes, if he stretches slightly, easily skim the edge of the mattress, and if he touches the nape of his neck the short hairs there tickle his fingertips rather than fade out into wispy curls. Other certain identifying parts of him are _definitely_ back, making their early morning presence known, but one soft snore from Rebecca is all it takes for him to realise he can’t bring himself to slip out to the bathroom and disturb her. 

He’d been blind-sided, the first time, and he won’t let himself be now. If it’s the last time he gets to have her curled against him like this he’s going to commit every inch of it to memory. 

It hadn’t occurred to him to be sentimental, those first few weeks before she called it quits. The sex had been good, her laughing with him and eating with him and spending the night in his bed had been good, and he hadn’t really felt the need to interrogate any of it any further. Until it stopped, and she’d left, and he’d lied awake in bed that night playing their time together on unbearable repeat in his brain, searching desperately for signs that he should have seen this coming, that he should have done things different. 

He stares at the face he’s spent the last week only being able to see in the mirror, at the body he now knows as intimately as his own. His insides feel warm, being able to look at her properly again, and his arm tightens possessively around her waist, the way she now fits back inside the crook of it foreign and familiar all at once. 

Her hand slides up to rub across her nose, smothering a snort, and when she falls still again he finds himself fixating on the plum coloured polish she’d insisted on painting on him the afternoon of the wedding. It’s rough around the cuticles and a little chipped, now, but the clarity with which he can recall it all—the smell of it stinging his nostrils and the way she squeezed his wrist to keep him still and the laughter that in his memory sounds nothing like him and only her—is the strangest kind of disconnect that it makes him dizzy. 

He knows it all too well, what it’s like to have her and not _have_ her, and he’s not an idiot—it’s what the past week has been at best. Tension. Curiosity. Fear. The ease of familiarity—all poor but obvious substitutes for what he really wants. 

He wants to hold her and wake her up and make love to her the way he wishes he could have that night he first had her back in his bed, and he’s just about to brush the hair back from her eyes and kiss her awake when she starts to stir all on her own.

* * *

It takes her awhile to process, the way her words don’t sound quite right and everything feels a little different, and she almost allows herself to let loose the confusion in her sleep until she jerks herself awake again at the last possible second, face pulling taut in a bemused frown.

When she cracks open one eyelid and then the other it’s Nathaniel’s face staring back at her, blue eyes wide and serious, hair mussed and flopping down over his forehead. 

She shifts off of him, and takes a second to scan and reassess her body; she feels smaller, softer, more appropriately sized inside her skin. Can sense suddenly where her tangled curls cascade over her bare shoulders and seal to her neck with dried sweat. No longer knows the sting of the sharp hairs breaking through the hard angle of her jaw but instead squeezes her legs together at the phantom sensation of where they’ve grazed her inner thighs, an injury that can only be described as self-inflicted. 

“You’re—”

“Yeah.”

“I’m—”

“Yeah.”

“We—”

He swallows and nods, giving her a shaky laugh. “Yeah.”

She drags herself into an upright position, still frowning through the fog. She doesn’t bother taking the sheet with her, the lack of modesty as much residual as it is her own nonchalance, and she doesn’t miss the way his eyes can’t help but slide over her as she rises above him. It’s not inherently sexual—they have some confusing physical reacquainting to do, that much is obvious—but there’s a latent heat there, a tenderness, that makes her keep her gaze fixed firmly on the bedspread.

It’s like a hangover—the aftermath of whatever this whole thing has been—and she digs the butt of her palm into her forehead with a frown.

“Hey,” he begins, tentative. His hand is too warm where it curls around the back of her thigh, and the panic bubbles up hot in her throat as she shifts away from him, needing space.

“Woah, this is…” She trails off, sucking in deep, shaky breaths that she tries to pull steady as her eyes dart around the room. “This is a relief, right? This is a… just, like, a really reassuring development. Not disorienting at all.”

When she drops out of the bed her hands go for Nathaniel’s sweatpants on autopilot and she has to stop herself and reassess, trying to remember and relocate whatever it was he’d been wearing the day before. It comes back to her in a white-hot flash—the way she’d blindly rolled the shirt up his body to get at him in the dark—and when a quick scan of the floor around the bed comes up empty she sidles back onto the bed to search the tangle of the sheets.

“Rebecca,” Nathaniel says quietly.

It’s too soft, too gentle, and she ignores him in favour of throwing back the blankets, her maroon t-shirt lost in the jarring sea of the new burgundy bedding.

“Rebecca,” he says again, more insistent this time.

She frowns and sits back on her heels, crossing her arms over her breasts. “What?”

 

“Why don’t we just stop for a second, and take a breath, and talk?”

Finally finding the t-shirt at the foot of the bed, she yanks it on and turns back towards him, relenting but still defensive. 

She feels nauseous, almost seasick, because last night she’d ended up a confused mess of _I respectfully decline all feelings_ and _everything is upside-down and you’re infuriatingly my sole earth wire to reality_ and _I don’t want to think anymore and this is a pretty good substitute all things considered,_ and in the wake of all that resignation she’d just wanted to bury herself inside the last thing that felt familiar, that made sense. Now, in the cold light of day, where the entire thing reads like an extended, bizarro nightmare, she can’t quite reconcile the way Nathaniel’s looking at her with how she felt a week ago, back at the start.

She wants to gather her things and run, and it’s only the overwhelming sense of deja vu that accompanies the impulse—the image of Nathaniel, sitting up, bewildered in the bed before she bolted the morning after the masquerade—that gives her pause now, taking a deep breath as requested and relaxing every muscle that had coiled tight, spring loaded, ready to flee.

* * *

“Look,” she says, avoiding his gaze. “Last night…”

Nathaniel works his jaw, casting his eyes down at the bedspread. It sounds suspiciously like the start of a conversation they’ve had a couple of times before, and he can feel the frustration bubbling up inside of him in an unrelenting stream.

“And the night before that,” he mutters, unable to keep the bitterness out of his tone. “And the night before that.”

“Yes, okay,” she concedes. “As we were already well aware, our impulse control when it comes to… certain physical connections that we share is, shall we say, admittedly, not great.” She takes a deep, steadying breath, and he hates the way she still won’t look at him. “But we’re both in agreement—nothing has changed. It was just curiosity, and chemistry, and blowing off steam, because hooking up with anyone else would have been dubious consent at best.”

The pressure on his windpipe is sudden and excruciating, like someone’s wrapped a giant, unforgiving fist around his throat and squeezed.

“Right,” he eventually forces out with a shaky, shuddering laugh, his agreement more to do with the predictability of her response than its sentiment. “Right.”

“Because you’re leaving, and we’re not… right for each other,” she continues, making a motion of finality with her hands and giving a matter of fact nod. “Feelings and… incredible sex aside, we’re just on different wavelengths.”

He thinks he should be used to rejection by now, the amount of times she’s thrown it back at him when he’s been stupid enough to think things were different the second, third, _fourth_ time around. But the sting of it still catches him off guard, the way her words can work their way between his ribs to needle into the exposed cracks she’s made in the shell he thought he’d so carefully built around his heart. It’s been the inevitable punishment, he supposes, for having had the bad sense to fall for a girl that hadn’t quite learned how to love herself, because nobody had ever bothered to show her how. Not that he’s ever been particularly skilled in that arena himself.

“I don’t want to be,” he says suddenly, catching her elbow. “On different wavelengths, that is. And I don’t think we are. Maybe we were, at some point. Or we were getting our wires crossed, but Rebecca—you and I, we’re the same. We fit together. This past week has only proven that. Right?”

“That’s the problem with parallels, Nathaniel,” she says imploringly, shaking her head. “They follow the same path, but they don’t intersect.”

_We did_ , his mind supplies immediately. What have they been doing this whole week if not _intersecting,_ in the most impossible of ways?

A quiet desperation overtakes him, filling up his lungs with the prickling panic at the possibility that if he lets her leave now he’ll never have her in his arms again. 

“Don’t. Don’t do this,” he murmurs into her neck, catching her and trying to hold her against him. He rubs his nose against hers, eyes growing glassy, nuzzling into her cheek. “You have no idea. The way I feel about you. Body swapped or not, you are always in my head.”

He feels as much as he hears the jagged intake of her breath.

She lets him hold her—lets the warmth wash over them at her being back in her body and still wrapped up in his—but only for second.

Her hands slide up to the sides of his face, pressing their foreheads together for a moment. “I have to go,” she whispers, blinking back her own set of tears.

He lets her go. And then, just like that, she’s gone.

* * *

Her head feels like it’s packed full of cement, and she’s halfway back to her place before it remotely registers that she’s taken Nathaniel’s car.

She’s had to creatively explain away far more complicated things than the presence of what everyone around her currently understands to be her boyfriend’s car in her driveway, but the creeping dread she feels at the prospect of having to see Nathaniel again at some point to switch them back comes with a slight aftertaste of guilt; the panicky part of her that’s particularly good at thinking in absolutes has already resigned itself to the fact that she owns a wanky electric car, now, and she’s never going to see her Subaru Legacy again.

Having snatched up the wrong set of keys and thusly denied herself entrance through her own front door, she mentally congratulates her past self for her laziness and, probably, carelessness in having the forethought to stash a spare key to her bedroom side entrance beneath a planter in case of booty calls.

Just as soon as she’s inside, she feels an all too familiar twinge that has her freezing at her bedside, hand still gripping the door handle to the patio behind her.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she mutters under her breath.

Tossing Nathaniel’s keys onto her bedspread, she absently spies a piece of paper that’s been left on her pillow but has to ignore it in favour of dashing down the hallway to the bathroom.

“Really?” she announces loudly to the mirror as she slams around, looking for her tampons. “ _That’s_ where you drew the line in the cosmic trickery? You couldn’t let the asshole deal with even a couple of drops of blood? I wasn’t asking for a gusher, or a nasty looking clot, or anything! Just some light spotting would have been fine!” She rips open the paper packet, nostrils flaring, contemplating the applicator with a growl. “Thanks for nothing, you _man_ -presenting mystical manifestation of the world’s most irritating weather phenomenon.”

It’s only once she’s in the midst of poking around in her lady parts that it occurs to her how strange it feels, suddenly not having a penis after a week of wielding one, and she can only guess at how alarming it must have been to Nathaniel to have lost his after spending thirty years or so in its unwavering presence. While she’s on the topic of re-familiarisation she hugs her free arm around her breasts for good measure, then immediately regrets it . 

“Oww. Yeah, okay. That one’s on me.”

Mid-contortion over the toilet seat she realises that while she could be imagining it, her core seems a little tighter than she remembers leaving it, although given her current state it could just as easily be the beginnings of cramps. Keen to nip that possibility in the bud as much as possible, she stomps out into the hallway and through Heather’s open door without knocking, heading straight for the vanity to snatch up her housemate’s lavender infused heat pack.

Heather’s standing in the middle of the kitchen when she gets there, glancing over her shoulder when she hears Rebecca’s footsteps behind her. “Um, hi, I guess. I didn’t hear you come home. But while you’re here, quick question—where’s Estrella?”

Rebecca grimaces, reaching up to open the microwave. “I just got in, and I came in through the side. Also, what? Who?”

Heather widens her eyes and gestures towards the empty space where the tank should be sitting on the counter. “Did you take the implication that she’s impossible to lose as a challenge? Because I haven’t even left yet.”

“Oh, right. That,” Rebecca sighs. “Nathaniel is babysitting the starfish, okay? I wanted to take my new role as a pet owner seriously, so I took her with me when I went to go see him last night so she wouldn’t be alone.”

“And then you forgot and left her there,” Heather says, voice slow and flat, “with the self absorbed asshole you’re barely on speaking terms with. Mm-hmm, super responsible, you’re right. My bad. Not rethinking my gesture of goodwill at all.”

“Yeah, but it’s cool, because in exchange, I stole his car. Wanna swap?” Rebecca pauses to down some ibuprofen. “Look, it’s fine, okay,” she adds with a dismissive wave off Heather’s unimpressed look. “Nathaniel has, like, a weird boner for marine life, so I’m sure she’s in more than capable hands.”

They stand in terse silence save for the hum of the microwave for the never-ending stretch of seconds it takes for it to chime, at which point Rebecca wastes no time in retrieving the heat pack and stuffing it unceremoniously down the front of her pants.

Heather sighs, puffing out her cheeks. “Look, I know you said you’re still trying to sort out your feelings, or whatever—”

“I did?” Rebecca interrupts. “When? Just to rehash, because I’m not saying I didn’t say that, and I have, like, a vague recollection of it, but like I said I’ve been feeling kind of fuzzy, lately—”

“At the wedding,” Heather says. “You were all bummed out that you were more invested in this whole thing than he was. And not to overstep, like at all, but you’ve still kind of been spending a _lot_ of time with him this week, so—”

“Because you’re leaving,” she blurts out suddenly, defensive, the realisation hitting her unexpectedly and the reaction she was denied in real time bubbling up out of her unbidden.

“Oh,” Heather says, looking down at the ground. “Yeah, so there’s definitely that.”

Rebecca bristles, and the emanating warmth pressed against her belly only stokes the coals of her hormone and body swap hangover-fuelled irritation. “You and Valencia are leaving. And I get that it isn’t about me, but at the same time it kind of feels like it is, so I threw myself into something else. Some _one_ else. Because that’s what I do. And you’re right, the joke’s on me, because now I’m losing that thing, too. So, wonderful. I’m so happy for you. When do you leave?”

Heather’s eyes drop in uncharacteristic contrition, the swell of her lower lip dragging through her top teeth.

“Bunch out,” Rebecca announces, embracing her own foul mood in full force as she bites out each syllable and starts to stomp back towards her bedroom to sulk.

“So should I tell V that’s, like, a no on helping us pack up my half of the kitchen later?” Heather calls out after her.

She slams her door shut in response.

* * *

It takes him about a half mile to find his rhythm again, but once he settles into it, Nathaniel realises going for a run is exactly what he needed.

It’s definitely freeing, no longer having Rebecca’s breasts to contend with, and he takes comfort in the effortless length of his stride now that he’s back in command of his own, significantly longer limbs. It’s only been a week but he’s seen the way Rebecca’s been eating—his body isn’t in the same state he left it and he welcomes the opportunity to throw all of his focus behind remedying it, behind making himself feel _normal_.

If he pushes himself, really pushes himself—concentrates on regulating his breathing and holding his form and the way his muscles are becoming his again with that familiar sort of burn—then he doesn’t have to think about Rebecca, or Rebecca leaving, or his insistence on making a fool of himself in front of her, repeating. Because when he wasn’t running—back at the apartment, in his bed—that’s all there was; the warmth seeping out of her side of the mattress and the embarrassing sting of the salt in his eyes.

When he feels himself reaching his limit he slows his pace, gulping down air to ease the burning in his lungs.

He considers driving to LA to treat himself to his favourite smoothie stand until he remembers he’s stuck with Rebecca’s car, and spending a couple of hours’ worth of a round trip in it probably isn’t the best idea when he’s trying so hard to push the remaining remnants of her from his mind.

Instead he swings by the grocery store a block away from his apartment and stocks up on kale and spinach and every other leafy green he knows Rebecca wouldn’t have touched the entire time she was taking up office space in his body. He makes sure to wash each one of them carefully before starting his meal prep—he learned that particular lesson the hard way—and lets the angry sound of the blender and its vibrations transfer through him via his grip on the lid, his muscles flexing and tensing in response. 

He wasn’t quite back to being himself this morning, that was all.

Nothing a good juice cleanse has ever failed to fix.

* * *

Her bedroom feels almost foreign.

It’s not just that it’s been awhile since she’s slept here, or that the last time she did, she hadn’t been alone. There’s the fact that it’s been inhabited in her absence, not just by Nathaniel but by Valencia, and Beth, and while everything is practically exactly the same as she left it, it’s all kind of wrong, too.

The note she’d spotted earlier had turned out to be from Valencia, thanking her for the use of her mattress the other night and encouraging her to stay positive. _Solid advice. Super helpful_ , she’d mused as she’d discarded it onto the nightstand with a sigh. 

Valencia makes the bed differently than she does—sheet curled back over the pillows, with the extra cushions arranged in a more decorative slant—and Nathaniel has folded her laundry with a precision that would put Marie Kondo to shame. One of them has gathered up the clothes she distinctly remembers discarding down the side of the bed the day before this unbelievable week was set in motion, and for some reason the sight of them now, neatly draped over the edge of the hamper makes her skin crawl. 

This entire week she’s had a million other impossible things to think about, her perspective perpetually skewed. Now that everything’s back to some degree of normal, all she can think about is how her entire life feels ill-fitted, and slept-in, and _used._

When she disrobes to shower she stares at herself in the mirror, cataloguing the disconnect. The skin of her stomach is flushed pink from the press of the heat pack, but that’s fine—it’s a cause and effect she recognises. It takes her a second, but the graze across her shoulder blades comes back to her, too—only it was Nathaniel she was slamming against the dressing room door that night, not the other way around, and she scrunches her eyes shut against the discordance of the memory.

But there’s a bruise on her hip she can’t explain, and a paper cut across her knuckle she wasn’t there for. Her body has eaten things and seen things and said things without her permission, and even though she _knows_ it’s the same for him—that she’d harnessed that fact with a degree of spite, even—it doesn’t change the way it feels something like a betrayal.

She stays under the hot water too long, until her whole body flushes the same colour as her stomach. She washes her hair two, three times because she doesn’t trust that he’s been doing it right, shaves and moisturises with far more care than she’d usually ever expend, like she’s soothing her skin, like she’s seducing it back into being hers.

When she gets back into her room, wrapped in a towel, she only hesitates in front of her dresser for a second before ripping the top drawer out completely and emptying it unceremoniously on the floor; dropping down cross-legged, she takes a deep, steadying breath, then starts to refold her things the right way, without the crispness and too-straight creases, until the spaces they occupy makes sense.

* * *

She can hear Valencia laughing.

She doesn’t remember consciously deciding to take a nap, but she wakes up warm and groggy, awkwardly propped up on her pillows, to the sound of muffled voices carrying through the door. A quick glance at the clock tells her that it’s only eleven, so she hasn’t dozed for long, though a quick assessment of her mood tells her she’s all the more better off for it. Fighting her way out of the uncomfortably damp towel she’s still somehow shrouded in, she gets dressed, pats around the covers to locate her phone and shoots Paula a text before shuffling, chagrined, out into the hall.

Her friends both stop what they’re doing to look up at her when she pauses in the doorway. 

Wordlessly, Rebecca crosses the remaining space towards the kitchen and picks up one of Heather’s novelty mugs—a turquoise blue whale with a handle fashioned out of its tail—and starts wrapping it in newspaper.

It takes a little while, but they cautiously resume their conversation after a couple of surreptitious glances Rebecca pretends to ignore are clearly being aimed in her direction.

“So obviously there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to be too much hassle for Beth and I to take to—to take with us,” Valencia self-corrects at Heather’s pointed look, “so if there’s anything you need for the new place, you should take it. You too, Rebecca.”

She rolls her eyes. “Look, guys, I appreciate the sensitivity, but you can say the n-word.” After a beat she clarifies, “Not, like, _the_ n-word. The N-Y words. You can say New York, is what I’m saying. If you’re still going to be talking about moving it’s not like censoring the name makes any difference.”

“You’re right,” Heather agrees. “We should talk about something else. Just like I thought we silently agreed via sustained eye contact just now. But my bad.”

“No,” Rebecca says, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t have to do that, either. I apologise for earlier. I’ve had just, um, the craziest week—like, you wouldn’t even begin to believe—and I was feeling raw, and I lashed out. But I’m past that now. I promise.”

“Thank god,” Valencia says, placing a bubble-wrapped dish carefully inside a cardboard box. “Because I’m going to need to pick your brain about where to shop and eat and go for drinks. You lived in NYC, so I _need_ your insider info, girl.”

They slip into an easy back and forth after that, the three of them collectively relaxing as the tension leeches noticeably from the room. Despite giving them the go-ahead, the conversation does, for the most part, veer away from their impending independent departures, as well as, for which she is grateful, the topic of whatever’s been going on between her and Nathaniel.

Eventually, though, she can’t help herself—curiosity wins out. 

“Hey, have you noticed anything weird going on with me lately? It’s just I’ve felt a little off-kilter, and it’s almost like I’ve been this whole different person, or something.” She braces herself for the commentary on exactly how out of character she’s been acting, preparing blanket defences in her head.

But Heather only shrugs. “Now that you mention it, you have kind of been weirdly attentive and like, dependable this week, and I did think to myself—huh, those big therapy bucks must finally be paying off. But then I walked into the kitchen to find my starfish missing, so… it’s fine. Guess you’re still in there somewhere.”

“Wait, hold up. Attentive and dependable, you say?”

“Again, my starfish is missing, but… yeah. I know you’ve been caught up in your exhausting hot lawyer boyfriend drama and not around much, but you’ve still been a big help running errands and making phone calls and, like, actually responding to text messages in a timely fashion.”

Valencia nods her agreement. “That is true. You only left me on read once, and it was a message about wedding decor, so your silence spoke volumes. And you were right—those flowers were _so_ tacky, they didn’t deserve the dignity of a response.”

“Huh.”

Her thoughts are interrupted when her phone chimes with a text from Paula, replying in the affirmative to her suggestion they do lunch, and she feels a surge of relief at the offered escape.

“So, this has been fun, but it looks like you two have got this covered, so I’m got to bounce,” she says, abandoning the single item she’s managed to wrap in the entire time she’s been in the kitchen, “and I will see you both later. Hey, Heathe? Can I borrow your car?” She doesn’t wait for a response before snatching the keys up off the counter. “I owe you one. Thaaaanks.”

She feels an uninvited pang when Heather only rolls her eyes, struck with the realisation that all too soon, she won’t have to be exposed to her housemate’s dry exasperation on an exhausting daily basis.

* * *

Desensitised as he’s become to the necessity of interacting with her this past week, it takes Nathaniel a stretch of seconds to process Heather’s presence on his doorstep and mark it as unusual.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, frowning as he takes her in.

She tosses his keys at the centre of his chest before pushing past him into the apartment.

“Rebecca’s avoiding you but she somehow ended up with your car, which means she’s borrowing _my_ car, and I didn’t want _your_ car parked in my driveway any longer than it had to be because I thought it might attract thieves and, like, send the wrong idea about my vibe.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Plus, you’re currently in custody of my starfish, and I don’t exactly trust you, so.”

“Rebecca’s starfish,” he corrects, possibly too quickly.

Heather’s eyes narrow into slits, and he fidgets under the scrutiny until he has to turn away from it, busying himself with sighing and shutting the door, against his better judgement. By the time he turns back, Heather has thankfully refocused her attention on another things, like perusing his bookshelf and poking and prodding at every second spine.

“Huh,” she says once she’s completed her critical survey of his space. “I was expecting this place to have more of a overcompensatory, masculine, stainless steel and matte black kind of feel. Instead it kind of just looks like an extension of Rebecca’s bedroom, so that explains a few things, I guess.”

Nathaniel rolls his eyes. “Other than critiquing my interior design sense—which is definitely currently more of a reflection of Rebecca’s tastes than my own—is there a reason you’re still here?”

“You should be careful about fashioning yourself in someone else’s image,” she tells him sagely. “It’s, like, not a good idea. Relationship wise.”

“Thanks. I’ll take that under advisement.”

Rebecca’s car keys are on top of a pile he’s managed to organise out of the stray belongings she’d failed to gather from around the apartment in her quick escape—her computer, her toiletries bag, a small variety of clothes—and Heather frowns as she scoops the lot of it up into her arms, no doubt suspicious of the sense of finality implicit in the gesture.

“You two do realise you can’t just pass a starfish around in your backseat like a dog when you go away for the weekend,” she says, eyeing the tank where it’s been set up atop his wooden cabinets. “Estrella’s going to get stressed out if you keep moving her.”

“Guess we’d better leave her where she is for the time being, then,” he shoots back.

Heather fixes him with one last withering glare over her shoulder before heading for the entryway, only to whirl around at the last minute. “I wasn’t going to say anything, because it’s not really my business, and even though I enjoy drama, Rebecca’s love life tends to be more of a tragedy, and that’s, like, not my favourite genre. But for some reason beyond my impressive comprehension skills, she really likes you, and anyone taking advantage of that—even before you take into account everything she’s already been through—is kind of a massive asshole.”

Nathaniel’s heart catches and squeezes unexpectedly at the ferocity with which she spits out _she really likes you_ for the split second it takes him to realise the sentiments Heather is reflecting on are probably just his own.

For a brief, inexplicable moment he wants to tell Heather everything—wants the gift of her offbeat wisdom and to return to the strange comfort that came with her long limbs treating his prone body like a climbing frame. But then he takes that flicker of vulnerability that’s never gotten him anywhere and pulls it deep down inside of him, until the irritation gets pushed out to make room and flares up, hot and defensive, in its place.

“I might be a massive asshole, okay, but caring about Rebecca has never been one of my shortcomings,” he says, sharply. He swings open the door with more force than is required and widens his eyes at her for emphasis. “But you’re right. It’s really none of your business.”

His eyes can’t help but linger on the maroon sleeve of Rebecca’s sweater that’s dangling over Heather’s shoulder as she leaves.

* * *

She arrives at the cafe before Paula does—a quaint little open-front with oversized paper lanterns suspended from the ceiling and walls plastered in posters from various performances being advertised over the years, until they’ve sealed the entire place over, like a living, breathing noticeboard operating as its own glossy, eclectic wallpaper. She’s only been here a handful of times, since it’s more out of the way than any of them can usually be bothered with, but it occurs to her now how much she enjoys the feel of it, now that she’s slowed down to drink it all in. 

A vast majority of the posters are for upmarket shows in LA—big name bands and Broadway tours that have taken up residence in the Hollywood theatres. She drifts her gaze from one familiar title to another, smiling fondly as her eyes trace the sweeping font of _South Pacific_ and cringing at at the one emblazoned _Cats._ She’s never really taken the time to notice before, in amongst the major draw cards, the smatterings of shows skewed a little more local— posters for student recitals and open air concerts in the park. A particularly brightly coloured piece of paper draws her eyes in proclaiming _Poetry Slam_ , and the adjacent reads _Open Mic._ The locations, she’s surprised to see, are places she’s frequented around the town.

Where her gaze eventually settles, though, is on something recent, which she can tell by the crispness of the white. It’s attached near the entryway, tacked up rather than plastered down, its edges fresh enough to not have curled. _Encore Eliot!_ jumps out at her in plain, bold, black font, and she finds herself stepping closer in her curiosity.

It’s an audition notice, still in-date, for an amateur revue. _I’m in love_ trills through her in an off-beat jailhouse chorus, and for a solid stretch of seconds she is unable to look away. 

Startling out of her reverie and shaking off the unexpected echo, she tugs on the flyer until the paper gives way around the pushpin, fishing her phone out of her pocket.

“Hey, Dr Akopian? It’s Rebecca Bunch. I was wondering if I could reschedule my appointment again. No, no, not cancel—I’d like to make it sooner rather than later, actually. And yes, I promise I’ll come alone. It’s just… Friday I think I’m going to have this thing…”

* * *

By the time she finishes up her call Paula is approaching through the front, and what she isn’t anticipating is the way her entire frame sags in relief when she finally spots her, something that clearly doesn’t escape the redhead’s attention.

“Cookie, what is it?” Paula asks, eyes going wide with concern.

Rebecca flings herself at her friend, hugging her tight. “Oh god, Paula—I missed you so much, you have no idea,” she mumbles into the shoulder of the other woman’s shirt. 

“That’s very sweet, but we only saw each other Friday night. Is everything okay?”

They disengage to sidle into a booth and Rebecca immediately reaches across the table to give Paula’s hand a squeeze. “You ever just have one of those days? Or, like, a week? Maybe an entire year?”

“Decades, even,” Paula offers in agreement. “Anything in particular to kvetch about, though?”

She runs over her list of grievances in her head, none of them striking her as advisable topics for conversation.

“I, uh, had a fight with Nathaniel,” she goes with, reluctantly, knowing she might as well start sowing the seeds for their inevitable fake break up. “I don’t really want to go into the specifics, and you’ll hear about most of it soon enough, anyway. It’s kind of a work thing, which makes it complicated. So yeah. Turns out that whole saying about mixing business with pleasure exists for a reason.”

Paula clucks in sympathy. “Oh, hon, I’m sorry. To be honest I’ve found the whole good cop bad cop thing you guys have had going on lately more confusing than anything, but I guess it’s been keeping people on their toes, so, power to the two of you in that respect.”

The implication that her best friend, at least, has noticed something amiss in her behaviour of late floods Rebecca’s chest with a reassuring warmth. Then she processes the rest of the statement, and tilts her head in a bemused frown. 

“‘Good cop bad cop’? What do you mean?”

“You know, with you being all serious and short with everyone, and Nathaniel sending everyone gift vouchers and trying to invite them out for lunch and be their friend.” Paula raises her eyebrows as she empties a packet of sweetener into her coffee. “I don’t know where it’s all been coming from, but it is _working—_ Tim’s barely left his desk all week _._ Don’t take this the wrong way, but since you’ve come back from jail, it’s like you, I don’t know, actually want to be there. And good—for—you,” she finishes, bopping the air in front of Rebecca’s nose on the final word for emphasis. “And just think—soon your letter from the bar will arrive, and this whole license mess will be cleared up, and in the past, and you and I, we can just go back to doing what we love, free of all those distractions.”

Rebecca shifts in her seat, the unease from earlier creeping back in. She _should_ be relieved that she can finally put everything behind her, both the ordeal Paula is referring to and other, more inadmissible ones alongside it. But the truth is, even though everything around her _is_ arguably on its way back to being normal, she doesn’t feel the same as she did back before it all got turned upside down. And just like she told Nathaniel that day on her porch the last time, she knows she’s still got so much to figure out.

“Paula? I’m not still waiting on my letter from the bar association,” she admits. “It came the other day.”

Paula reaches across the table to grab her hand. “What? What did it say?”

Steadying herself with a deep breath, Rebecca shrugs then says, “I don’t know. I didn’t open it.”

“What do you mean, you didn’t open it,” Paula guffaws, the laughing disbelief only fading somewhat when she takes in the expression on Rebecca’s face. “Oh, you’re serious.”

“Yeah. I felt kind of sick, and like my chest was getting tight every time I even thought about looking, and I assumed it was just nerves, you know—that I was stressing about what to do if they hadn’t ruled in my favour. And then I realised, that wasn’t it. Which made me wonder if the opposite was true. If I was more scared of what it meant if they had.” She wraps her hands around her mug as if seeking to draw comfort from its warmth. “And _then_ I realised—it wasn’t that I was scared of what it said, so much as I didn’t _care_ what it said. And that in itself was scary. Does that make sense?”

Paula pulls a face that suggests she doesn’t, not really. 

“I know it’s not logical, but I just had this moment where I wondered—why does it have to be some stupid envelope making a choice for me? I meant what I said to you that day in the courtroom, Paula—I’m done letting some outside force control my life.”

“Okay, hon,” Paula says slowly, giving her hand a supportive squeeze. “I hear you, I do, and that’s a real nice sentiment, it is. But the bar association isn’t exactly some grand mystical being handing down higher judgment, no matter which way they like to paint it. It’s not so much a sign as it is an official document. With real life ramifications.”

“And I’m going to open it at some point. I am. My point is, what that letter says is kind of irrelevant until I work out what _I_ want, and I’m not going to let it sway me until I’ve considered my options.”

Her fingers toy with the edges of the flyer, safely tucked away in her pocket.

Paula continues to look skeptical. “Okay, but what happens when you do all this soul searching and decide this _is_ where you want to be, and that piece of paper you’ve just been avoiding turns around and says it was never actually an option to begin with?”

Rebecca lets out a breath, tapping the home button of her phone to check the time and biting her lip in a pre-emptive wince. The Google Cal reminder for her next appointment flashes across the screen. “Oh boy. If you think me putting off opening a letter is a little crazy, you’re _really_ not going to like what I’m about to do next.”

* * *

The apartment feels empty after Heather leaves and takes the last of what’s left of Rebecca with her.

Then again, that’s not entirely true—his bed is still resplendent with the rich red covers she’d redecorated with, the couch still overflowing with her excessive collection of brightly coloured throw pillows. He knows there’ll be things he’s missed, odds and ends and excuses he could use to see her, just as soon as he’s done nursing his repeatedly injured pride.

Running had cleared his head while it had lasted, and laundry and meal prep and tidying had kept the fruitless replays of the morning at bay for awhile. But then the evening had come, and everything had grown quiet, and dark, and it had started to become all too painfully obvious to him that he was being left alone with his thoughts.

Her soon-to-be-ex-housemate’s ex-starfish proves to be poor company; while he would normally find the mindless hum of the filter relaxing, the cool blue aura of Estrella’s tank sits at odds with the golden glow of his downlighting, another burst of colour bequeathed to his world courtesy of Rebecca, and when he asks her how she’s settling in he gets nothing in response. So against his better judgement, he pours himself a finger of scotch, and his mind begins to wander.

He hasn’t got a place lined up in LA but it’s easy enough to paste in some reimagining of his old one, to fill it with furniture and tokens, to fast forward and repopulate his world. Coworkers, friends from college, family acquaintances of old. It’s not much of a stretch, then, to keep pushing on, to bleed out and blend in the life his parents saw for him with Mona—lofty brownstone townhouse and two kids, because the first one was a girl. He sees the flip side to this future, too; hates the way he can’t help but romanticise it in his mind. Long nights spent late at the office, nursing a drink or three, staring at his phone, hoping someone else that looks a little like his wife but not quite might call.

With Rebecca he never knows what’s coming, even when he does, and he hates it and can’t get enough of it all at once. When he’d looked at Mona he could think in checklists, of every neat little requirement in his life she could fulfil. When he looks at Rebecca he doesn’t think—his mind goes blank and his heart feels warm and he doesn’t want that feeling to stop, not ever.

And it’s not that he believes in soulmates—because he _doesn’t_ —but if, hypothetically speaking, exchanging consciousnesses with someone else were a thing—which, again, it’s _not,_ and yet, here they are—surely, _surely_ there’s something to be said for the compatibility involved.

The thing is, a secret part of him has for so long felt like they’re inevitable, and isn’t that only a few points shy of calling her the human girl of his dreams, if it came down to it?

There’s other futures, in there somewhere—ones that started blossoming inside of him the first night she squirrel jumped into his arms. Things he’d never really thought about, or wanted, or believed were meant for him before. Futures he’d been stupid enough to allow to breed and multiply with hope, but never quite stupid enough to share.

His phone vibrates loudly on the coffee table, startling him, and for a moment his entire circulatory system grinds to an eager halt.

It turns out to be Maya’s name, and not Rebecca’s, that’s splashed across the screen, and when he has to blink at the letters to get them to focus he finds himself reaching for the discarded reading glasses in front of him, curiosity begrudgingly piqued.

_Oh em gee,_ Maya gushes in inarguably clearer type, _thank you SO much for the day spa gift certificate. Hashtag best boss EVER. Consider this secretary steamed, primped and preened._

He rips the glasses off, irritated. 

He leaves the bedspread, the pillows, the vases, and with a heavy sigh, starts to pack away his books.

* * *

When Rebecca gets home there’s a note on the fridge from Hector announcing he and Heather have gone out for their first pizza as a married couple, and she yanks it out from under the magnet pinning it to the door and stares at it for a moment before scrunching it up and tossing it in the trash.

Unevenly-reheated tub of pad Thai in hand, she trudges up the hallway to her bedroom and settles herself back into the neatly arranged pile of pillows. It should be a relief, being back in her own bed, her own clothes, her own body, her _life._ Instead she just feels unbalanced, uneasy; like she’s missing an important part of her she’s still waiting to get back.

Her earlier conversation with Heather and Valencia still playing on her mind, she unlocks her phone and navigates to the text chains with two of them, scrolling through the back and forths that have taken place over the week. There’s nothing upsetting or untoward—in fact she’d coached Nathaniel through half of them—but heat starts to prickle up the back of her neck when she scrolls up further to compare the interactions to a week ago, pre-switch. Heather is right—she’s a terrible texter at the best of times, and even when she does reply, often unreliable in follow-through. Far too many of her messages are meek apologies for missed lunch dates, for borrowed items unreturned. Nathaniel’s stint in presiding over her inbox, however, had seen a sharp uptick in response rate. His texts were timely, polite, unexpectedly thoughtful. She wonders how much of it had come from his own personal habits versus his overly generous estimations of her own behaviour.

She switches instead to the conversation thread with the man in question, swallowing down the queasy feeling rising in her stomach just in looking at his name. They haven’t had much use for texting recently, given their cohabitation, and the last message in the window is her request from the day prior. _Can you come back to the apartment? We need to talk._ She stares at the words until her eyes sting from the glare of the screen and she has to blink; it’s only been an hour but she’d be lying if she said a secret part of her hasn't been waiting to hear from him.

She wonders if he’ll contact her when he finds out what she’s done.

The things she’d left at his place are still neatly stacked on the edge of the bed where Heather deposited them, and she tries to imagine Nathaniel gathering them in her wake. She can’t decide between the despondence he’d been overcome with this morning and the pointed petulance she’s been witness to in spurning him before; she settles instead on the compromise of cool indifference, his mouth pulled taut in a cold, hard line. She buries her fingers in the soft pile of her sweater and, in a private moment of tenderness, lets herself believe Nathaniel might have done the same.

Her throat tightens, and stomach clenching with guilt, she pulls her stuffed alligator flush against her body, finding comfort in the weight of it, and buries her face in the vice of its felted jaws, praying for a deep and dreamless sleep.


	10. two bodies that were parting ways

They never even make it out of the bedroom.

Rebecca’s spread-eagled out across his chest, the bedspread tucked in tight around her so that only the messy mop of her hair is visible. She hasn’t moved since she crawled up there approximately half an hour ago, and from the lack of movement and the way he’s starting to lose all sensation in his left arm, Nathaniel doesn’t think that’s about to change any time soon.

It’s fine, Nathaniel thinks—with the pure contentment radiating through the entirety of his cells, he’d be a pretty easy sell on staying here forever.

“We should get up,” Rebecca eventually mumbles in a surprising sign of life. “We need to go to the store. I think we’re out of orange juice.”

“That stuff you drink is not orange juice,” he scoffs, chin digging into the top of her head. “It’s sugar water that happens to be orange in colour.”

“Uh, yeah. The _best_ kind.”

She starts to shift in his grip so he releases her with reluctance, body blindly chasing hers when she slides down to stretch out on her side beside him, taking the bulk of the bedding with her.

He’s never really been big on lingering in bed but the cosy cocoon of blankets and the warmth emanating from Rebecca is a convincing argument; he’s not entirely sure what day it is but it feels like a Sunday, and it’s not like they have anywhere to be, grocery shopping notwithstanding.

When the contented puff of her breath hits his cheek he blinks his eyes sleepily open to her smiling like she has a secret, teeth sinking into her finger where she curls it in front of her face.

“What?” he asks.

Her eyelids flutter shut as she stifles a giggle, wriggling her hips forward to fit herself more firmly against him. “You love me,” she says, grinning at him.

He rolls his eyes. “I tolerate you, at best.”

She frowns, and his mouth moves down over the puckered bump of her chin to smooth it out, pressing his praises against the line of her jaw with his lips. Tracing over her pulse point when he gets to it, he starts off with a gentle nip before pulling the soft skin of her throat between his teeth and sucking, until she’s a squirming mess of overstimulated nerves and burst capillaries and the moan drags out of her long and low.

“Don’t,” she whines in breathless, laughing protest, even as she tips her head back and grips the back of his neck to hold him against her. 

He releases the skin before it can bruise too badly, soothing it with a swipe of his tongue that he turns into a chaste kiss. Just as simply as he’d stirred, he enfolds her in his arms and closes his eyes, content to slide back towards sleep. She doesn’t settle so easily, though—fidgeting against him, sighing, her gaze so pointed he can feel it boring through the thin skin of his eyelids.

Fingers tangling in her hair, he blinks himself back awake. “What?” he asks, voice raspy and rough.

“Tell me,” she says, pouting. 

The hand not cupping the back of her head slips up between them to find hers and he grazes his lips over her knuckles before twisting her wrist gently to kiss her palm. “I love you,” he says softly, squeezing her fingers in his. Pecks her on the side of her mouth. “I love you. Do you love me?”

“Mm-hmm,” she hums, hitching a leg high over his hip. “Let me show you.”

And then he wakes up before he can find out how.

 

* * *

 

There’s a pile of sheets bunched up in Nathaniel’s arms when he rouses to the sound of his six o’clock alarm. 

He knows he should be relieved, back in his own body, his own bed, his apartment once again solely his own. He’s always valued his privacy, his alone time—the opportunity to isolate himself and _think._ Instead, he can’t help but find his gaze sliding over to the other side of the mattress where Rebecca should be, and he seems to be suddenly incapable of doing anything else.

The pervasive sense of calm lingering from his dream peters out by the time he shuts off the buzzer, but the clarity of what he’d seen does not, and he feels the discrepancy between the fantasy and current circumstance like the raw ache of an open wound.

His bladder eventually comes to the rescue, commanding him up and out of the bed and towards the bathroom, and the steam of the shower helps him shrug off his early morning nihilism. Autopilot thankfully kicks in after that—he shaves, brushes his teeth, teases his hair into its standard cocky swoop.

He steps out of the bathroom just in time to see the lit screen of his phone fade back into blackness, and nearly trips over one of the errant boxes cluttering his floor in the process of reaching for it. When he checks his notifications he has two missed calls from his father, and his inbox count is usually high.

One of the Pottery Barn throw pillows Rebecca bought peeks out at him from where he’d tossed it over the back of the couch in his annoyance the night before, sandwiched against the window and disrupting the otherwise clean drape of his curtains.

He sighs, tosses the phone back onto the bedspread, ignores the offending cushion, and starts to dress for work.

 

* * *

 

By the time Rebecca drags herself out of bed, well after nine o’clock, Heather is seated cross legged in front of the television unit, the contents of its cupboards strewn haphazardly across the floor.

“Hey,” Rebecca greets sleepily, plopping down ungracefully beside her in her pyjamas. “This the last of your stuff?”

“Yeah. I was putting off tackling it because I knew it was kind of a mess in here—Hector’s really bad at putting the discs back in the right cases.”

Rebecca scrunches up her nose. “Yeah, some of those were probably me—he always leaves his games in the Playstation, and I don’t really understand how to switch it back to DVD, so I just put them back into the case of whatever I’m about to watch so they don’t get scratched.”

“Okay, well, not to knock your system or anything, but it takes literally two seconds to read the title and look for the corresponding case that’s usually just been, like, dumped on top of the unit.”

“I guess that’s not going to be a problem now, huh?” Rebecca answers, wistful. “I mean, for you, maybe. Not for me.”

Heather leans over to bump her shoulder deliberately with her own before tossing a case into her lap. “This one’s definitely yours.”

Rebecca examines her copy of _Mamma Mia!_ for a moment with the blank-minded stare of someone who has not properly yet pulled awake, unable to help her mind from wandering from the wedding imagery of the cover to the events of a few days prior. She’s about ten seconds out from slipping into an ABBA-themed attempt at hashing out the current state of her own love life when Heather startles her back to reality with another well-aimed nudge.

“You not working today?”

Rebecca shakes her head. “Playing hooky in solidarity,” she lies. “Thought you might need me to like, watch you carry things to your car, or something.”

Heather snorts. “Well, sorting these has been surprisingly straightforward. Cheesy romance—you. Tarantino—me. Disney musical—you. Obscure nature documentary—me.” She flashes _10 Things I Hate About You_ in Rebecca’s direction. “The only real close calls are late 90s/early 2000s teen romcoms, because I’m, like, nostalgic and stuff.”

“That one’s yours,” Rebecca concedes, “but I’m pretty sure when we watched it with Valencia we just used Netflix.”

Heather nods sagely. “Putting discs in is _such_ an effort.”

Rebecca finds herself suddenly, overwhelmingly winded by the fuzzy, layered memory of being draped across her couch, with any of the various possible combinations of her and her girls—eating popcorn, drinking wine, painting each others’ nails. Before she can squash the probably ill-advised impulse, her arms shoot out to wrap tightly around the closest available of Heather’s, tugging her soon-to-be-ex housemate closer and resting her head on her shoulder. Heather jerks in surprise at the affectionate assault before relaxing into it, patting Rebecca hesitantly on the head.

“I feel like I’ve taken our time as roommates for granted,” Rebecca mumbles into the tangle of Heather’s hair.

“Oh, you definitely have,” she agrees. “But also? We’re still going to see each other _all_ the time. I’m not stupid—I know there’s no getting rid of you that easy.”

Rebecca only manages to half-quirk her mouth up in return. “Not Valencia. Valencia’s going to New York. And you’re going to busy with your job, and doing whatever it is married people do. And Paula’s going to graduate soon and I… I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I mean, I’ve got a few small leads, but I’m not counting any chickens, if you know what I’m saying.”

Not to mention certain recent life choices that were beginning to look more questionable by the second when you began to take into consideration now being responsible for one hundred percent of the rent.

“You can count this chicken,” Heather offers with a consolatory smile, jabbing a thumb in the direction of her chest. “Whether she lives with you or not. And I think I know of, like, at _least_ two others. One of them would almost definitely take issue with the analogy, though, because she doesn’t like birds.”

Rebecca laughs, impending sense of panic momentarily abated. “Yeah,” she breathes, hugging Heather’s arm tighter. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. Gurl group is for evah, right?”

“And evah,” Heather confirms.

Finally relinquishing her grip on her friend’s tattooed limb, Rebecca turns her attention back to the spread of movies in front of them, dutifully helping sort them into their appropriate groups until one of the titles in Heather’s ‘take’ pile catches her eye and she pitches forward, upending the stack of cases to get at it.

“Can I borrow this?”

Heather heaves a sigh as she surveys the damage, then obediently leans over to look. “If by borrow you mean take and probably never return again—ugh, I guess. I’m not, like, hugely attached to it. It’s no _She’s the Man._ ”

Rebecca stares at the cover a little longer before shaking her head as if to rid herself of her fixation on it; she places it up on the television cabinet, out of reach, and sheepishly sets about tidying her collateral.

 

* * *

 

Rebecca isn’t in the office when he gets there, but that’s neither unusual or unexpected, given the circumstances.

Paula is, though, which isn’t necessarily alarming—she’s a good worker, with far more respect for office hours than her best friend has ever shown—but he is a little surprised, what with her still having a—child? children, plural?—of school age to provide for. Breakfasts and drop-offs have presumably effectively kept her from ever getting in as early as he does, but this morning she’s in and settled, already on the phone, notes spread out before her and a reluctant cringe contaminating her features.

She hesitates when they make eye contact, her free hand fluttering over her array of papers as if trying to wager it being worth making the last ditch effort to conceal them, and he considers taking the cue to loom disapprovingly, deciding at the last minute decides he doesn’t care, and instead offering her only a curt nod as he heads towards the break room.

The sole upside to being beaten into the office is that there’s a fresh pot of coffee ready and waiting, and as he pours himself a healthy cup he can’t help but overhear the hurried snatches of Paula’s conversation.

“I understand that, honey, but I’m not even familiar with Hanifa’s case. Not to mention the fact that I’m not technically a lawyer yet, _and_ I’m going to have you-know-who breathing down my neck if I try to slip out—”

Frowning, he lowers his mug to the countertop, abandoning his preliminary sip, and makes his way back towards the paralegal’s cubicle, raising his eyebrows when she hisses out a _I’ll see what I can do_ and slams down the receiver the second she notices his return.

This time she does make an attempt to hide her papers, burying them under a stack of old meeting minutes she snatches from the top of her in tray. “Morning,” she offers cheerily, as if it isn’t blatantly obvious what she’s doing.

“Who was that?” he asks, gesturing at the phone.

“Oh, uh, nobody. Nobody important. A client. I mean, of course our clients are important, but just the ordinary amount of important, is what I’m saying.”

He hums, unconvinced. “So Rebecca, then?”

“Yeah,” she concedes.

He nods, then holds out his hand expectantly. Paula looks at him in confusion.

“Give me the notes on the case. Hanifa, is it? I’ll look into it.”

She continues to stare at him blankly. “You’ll look into it.” She spreads her fingers over the manila folder, two five-fingered, pink-tipped octopi jabbing in disbelief at the documents. “This case. This pro-bono case. At a women’s jail.”

“Yes,” he says, snatching them off her in irritation. “Rebecca brought me up to speed on the work she’s been doing there, and I… think I can help.”

“You want to help Rebecca do unpaid work, on company time, after she just broke up with you,” Paula continues to clarify, tone flat and skeptical. “What is this, some kind of ploy to win her back?”

The question catches him off-guard, squeezing painfully at his windpipe. Of course their romantic ruse to explain away their co-habitation is no longer necessary, but it doesn’t quite stop the sting of how Rebecca had evidently wasted no time in dismantling their obsolescent cover.

“No,” he snips, defensive as he tugs on his jacket. “I just think I could be of use. I helped her out with Nicky’s case,” he adds, which is not a lie, “and I enjoyed the challenge. It felt… good, helping someone that really needed it. I liked it. And you’re right—Rebecca and I are broken up, and it’s… complicated, so honestly I could use the distraction.”

Paula regards him with thinly veiled suspicion for a moment longer before she relents, still wary but sympathetic as she hands him the file. “Well, it’s not like I couldn’t use the help. Rebecca’s busy dealing with—” She stops herself, clearing her throat. “—well, other things, but I’ve got finals coming up, and my son is trying to join the Peace Corps, for some reason, so—”

“Tell her I’ll take care of it,” he interrupts. Then, off her raised eyebrow, “Or don’t. Just tell her it’s handled. Irrespective of my involvement.”

With a flick of his wrist, he pivots on his heel to turn towards his office, making a detour to collect his coffee from the break room on the way.

 

* * *

 

By the time Thursday rolls around, she almost forgets about her rescheduled therapy appointment.

Luckily, past her had possessed the foresight to program a reminder in her phone, so for once in her life she finds herself making the drive to Dr Akopian’s somewhat ahead of schedule rather than behind, taking advantage of the unhurried travel time to blast the _Best of Broadway_ CD she’d found stashed in her glove compartment. She skips straight ahead to the Ellison tracks to re-familiarise herself, on some level hoping the spirit of the songwriter will magically imbue her via some kind of musical osmosis.

She’s so preoccupied rehearsing in her head that she doesn’t even notice the car parked in the street until she all but crashes into its owner, coming down the driveway with a brusque, embarrassed gait. By the time they right themselves and she draws back, finally processing the incongruity of bumping into him _here_ , of all places, his face is very much _you were not supposed to see me._

Nathaniel swallows, smoothing down his tie and fidgeting with the envelope grasped tightly in his other hand. “I thought your therapy day was Friday.”

It’s only been a handful of days since she saw him last, but her skin prickles unexpectedly with the memory of it—the way he’d held her, gentle and desperate, and begged her quietly not to go. She rubs her hand down her arm, willing away the resulting goosebumps, and schools her features into what she hopes resembles something unaffected.

“It is. I had to reschedule, I had a thing.” She blinks at him, two impossible dots suddenly connecting in her brain. “Wait. Are you… are you here for a session? Are you in _therapy_? What is happening right now?”

Her confusion is still secondary to the uninvited stirrings of relief— _you’re still here_ , is what had been ready, surprised and unbidden, on the tip of her tongue—but then her gaze tracks back down the driveway to his shiny electric car, parked mere feet away from her Subaru. She wonders if her failure to register its presence is in someway a symptom of the short time she’s spent driving it as her own.

Nathaniel shifts on his feet, eyes rolling away from her as he clears his throat. “After our… unorthodox session last week, I guess your doctor’s office had me on file, and they contacted me to see if I would be needing a follow up. And after thinking about it for awhile, I decided, why not? Her Yelp reviews are very good.”

Rebecca winces. “Yeah… a lot of those were me. I had some balance to restore, so.”

“Patient confidentiality aside, we both agreed that in this case, a little more distance would probably be for the best. So she referred me to her husband. Also a therapist.”

She manages to stop herself from bringing up Josh, reminding herself the information is not hers to share. Not for the first time, she’s struck by what an absurdly small world West Covina continues to prove to be, and wonders what bizarre alternate universe she’s found herself in that two—or all three, if she’s to believe Marco’s assurances—of her recent exes are in therapy, making some sort of professionally guided attempt at bettering themselves. Wonders if being the thing they have in common is a net positive or negative contributing factor in that respect.

“Oh, you’re seeing Davit? Nice. A fellow man for you to unload all your gruff, heterosexual, male problems to,” she teases.

“Uh-huh. Only I finally realised why the name Akopian sounded so familiar. And he and I have a misfortunate degree of separation of our own, it turns out.” He taps the envelope twice with his fingers. “The association doesn’t really work for me, so we were looking at some other options.”

Brow crinkling, she offers him a timid smile. “Hey—I’m happy for you. Really. And kind of sorry that I literally drove you to therapy. But you know what? In the nicest possible way: you deserve it.” When his answering smile is entirely self-deprecating, she squeezes his arm, sincere. “I mean it, Nathaniel. I care about you, and I want you to be happy.”

She lets her hand drop away and takes a deep breath, ready to carry on up to the door, hating how uncertain everything feels between the two of them but incapable of even beginning to parse all that out right now. Not when she has other important life changes to think about, and her stomach already steadily filling with butterflies in anticipation of what the following day might bring.

“Rebecca, wait,” Nathaniel calls out before she can raise her hand to knock. “About what you did, with my dad.”

Her eyes fall shut, bracing herself for his anger. Instead, when she opens them, his face is entirely open, slack with what she can only describe as awe.

He looks almost nothing like his father, she thinks, remembering the thin-pressed smile that didn’t reach the senior Plimpton’s eyes as he’d begrudgingly heard her out. Maybe he had, once, a long time ago, but she’s long past the stage where she’s been able to relate him back to the cold and calculated gaze of the man in the family lineup on the office wall, the disparity only compounded by the way his reflection now feels almost as familiar as her own. She finds herself wondering what his mother looks like—if the features his face have slowly softened into are hers.

“For the record, most of your father’s reasonings were totally misogynistic and offensive and gross, and _god,_ pandering to that killed me inside, it really did. But if I was making that choice regardless—and it honestly _was_ regardless—it only made sense to help you out at the same time.”

She’d definitely managed to sound a lot more sure of herself than she’d felt, squaring off against someone she knew regarded her with little more than disdain. Still, she’d felt the flare of satisfaction when she’d declined his proffered handshake and kept her chin held high as she’d laid out her cards, and the echo of that sentiment steadies her even now. 

_I am recusing myself as senior partner of this firm on the condition that the resulting equity will be evenly split between Nathaniel and Darryl._

She can’t wait to hear what Dr Akopian has to say about that particular development.

“You can’t just quit being a lawyer. It doesn’t make sense.” He stops himself with a disbelieving shake of his head. “I mean, your work ethic—that’s always left something to be desired. But you are… very good at what you do, Rebecca.”

His tone is warm and fond and still tinged with that incomprehensible awe, and it takes her unexpectedly back to the supply closet, his body holding hers up against the door as she quakes with aftershocks, her skin rosy and him always so reluctant to release her and let her go.

“Sometimes, being good at something isn’t a good enough reason to keep doing it.” 

She can see in the way his face falls that he doesn’t miss her double meaning.

“Hey,” she says, trying for placating. “The day you and I met, I was ready to quit, remember? I was ready to walk away, in the interest of happiness.” She widens her eyes suddenly, realisation blossoming on her face. “Please don’t threaten to fire Paula to get me to stay. That was an unwise callback, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Nathaniel chuckles, quick to allay her fears. “Please—fire just about the only person in that place that actually knows what they’re doing? I’m not an idiot.”

She tilts her head at him. “Well…”

“Previous evidence to the contrary. I know.”

“Anyway, I don’t know if I’m done with law for good. Maybe I’ll go back to school, study up on criminal justice. Save us all the embarrassment next time one of us gets arrested,” she jokes, but it falls flat, the half-smile she receives in return not quite reaching his eyes. “Either way, as much as I hate to say it, your dad was kind of right,” she says with a shrug. “We shouldn’t be working together. Whether we’re in a relationship or not, the evidence is really not in our favour.”

There’s no arguing with that particular point, she can tell he knows.

“I’m done rubbing off on this place,” she adds. “You—you could still do with absorbing a little more West Covina into your life.”

Her phone vibrates in her pocket, startling her away from their unnerving eye contact. Nathaniel seems to shake off the cobwebs of something, too—taking a step back as if to ward off whatever undefinable emotion had begun to settle over them both.

She flashes the screen at him, brandishing the notification for her imminent appointment between them like a shield. “I should go. I’m actually on time for once, and I don’t wanna miss the surprise on Dr Akopian’s face when she realises she’s going to have to work my entire hour—usually she gets ten minutes or so to herself at the start.”

“Of course,” Nathaniel coughs politely. His thumb swipes across his brow. “You should… I should go.”

She peeks through the gap in the door before she closes it completely, watching Nathaniel as he rubs twice at the back of his neck, tilts his head skyward, then eventually gets in his car and goes.

 

* * *

 

It rattles him, seeing Rebecca again.

Not that it’s been particularly long, or that he thought he’d never run into her; it’s just that there’d been such a sense of finality, the way things had ended up playing out.

Spending a week trapped in her body feels like a distant fever dream; like something he fell asleep watching and projected himself into after consuming leafy greens of a questionable quality. Which isn’t surprising, really, given that the sole other person privy to the whole impossible scenario had slipped out of his apartment approximately a week ago, blinking back tears, and promptly proceeded to turn his entire life upside down _again,_ without—until yesterday—a single word of explanation. It was like living in a vacuum, and with the absence of Rebecca alongside him as living, breathing confirmation of the experience, he was almost beginning to question his own sanity.

Which may or may not have ultimately contributed to him answering in the affirmative when Dr Noelle Akopian’s assistant had called him four mornings prior, asking if he would be requiring a recurring appointment.

It’s not the whole truth, though, and Rebecca’s psychiatrist seems very big on honesty—something he’s never been overly concerned with until very recently, when he met Rebecca, and all kind of confessions started tumbling out of him unchecked. He’s had the opportunity to see what centred, self-awareness sounds like coming from his mouth, and it’s not quite so inconceivable as he’d initially thought. Rebecca made it look effortless sometimes—even if she was far better at it in theory than in practice—but he’s had a glimpse, now, of the work that took. Is oddly grateful for the snippets of inadvertent groundwork she’s managed to lay on his behalf. It seems silly, if he’s being practical, to let that all go.

Consequences of Rebecca’s behaviour in his body aside, though, there was now the much more pressing and palpable issue of her abrupt resignation via some kind of verbal agreement with his father, something he had been forced to find out about in a very curt email after failing to answer any of his namesake’s calls. _Change of plans_ , the correspondence had read, without even so much as a formal greeting. _You’re staying put. For now._ Relevant paperwork dispassionately attached.

He’d felt numb, afterwards, caught again in disconcerting isolation. Nobody at the office had known of his imminent departure, save for Rebecca, and now they most likely never would.

So between the fleeing and the quitting and the complete and utter lack of contact, he’d sort of resigned himself to the fact that he and Rebecca were done—for good this time— which is why he’d been so foolishly unsuspecting when he’d bumped into her—quite literally—leaving her therapist’s office.

Now that he’s seen her, he can’t help but think about when the next time he sees her might be, and that in itself just leads to a series of looping, unproductive thoughts that he’d rather not find himself falling back into.

He wonders if he’ll ever be able to look at her and not feel anything.

His meal prep is interrupted by the chiming of his phone, vibrating gently against the dark of his granite countertop. When he sees Tim’s name splashed across the notification screen, his eyes get caught somewhere between raised brows and a roll.

_Hey man, me and Jimothy are hitting up that new sports bar on Azusa tonight—you in?_

He blinks, ready to dismiss it as a wrong number when a follow up comes through.

_Not sure what their coverage on water polo is like, but I think they carry a mean scotch?_

Confusion mounting by the second, but woefully aware this is far from the weirdest thing that’s happened to him the past few weeks, he scrolls up, skimming the rest of their chat log for clues. It doesn’t take a detective to surmise that Rebecca—apparently unimpressed with the lack of social exchanges taking place on his phone, or maybe just feeling bored, or vengeful, or both—had taken it upon herself to start up some electronic small talk with their employees, starting not-so-innocently with a text chain of lunch invitations he finds mockingly entitled _I’m nice now._

He sighs. Maybe there was some tangible evidence of their ordeal after all.

 _Not tonight,_ he types back, and after some deliberation, reluctantly adds, _but maybe some other time. Thanks._

He’s not sure how much therapy it would require to prepare him to socialise in an intimate setting with any of his subordinates, but he’s happy to keep to baby steps. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t strangely… flattered, to have been thought of, and surely that admission alone must fulfil his introspective quota for the week.

Instead of shutting off his phone as he initially intended, he navigates instead into his messages with Whijo, thumbing through their recent messages with a frown. He’d thought he could make a clean break, when he was heading back to LA—that he was some kind of lone wolf, ice-cold and unattached. He’d deluded himself in thinking Rebecca had been the sole exception to that rule.

_Sorry for being MIA lately—we should catch up soon. Drinks? Gym?_

The cycling ellipses appear almost immediately, and he sucks in a breath, waiting to be hit with an onslaught of quintessential White Josh derision in return.

_Sure, dude. When you free?_

Maybe he’s not so bad at this whole human connection thing as he thought, either.

 

* * *

 

She’s so buzzed from her audition that she forgets, for a moment, that she’s coming home to an empty house.

Her therapy can only carry her so far, she knows—naming the emotions and counting the breaths help to keep her steady but can’t completely alleviate the rush of longing in their wake. Personal betterment, she’s realising, isn’t always such a gift—now she has the tools for guided introspection, she can just be grounded and present _and_ painfully self-aware.

She trudges glumly through the rooms, flicking on lights to feel less alone. It’s a Friday night, and even if they still lived here, Heather and Hector would most likely not be home, so she lets herself imagine they’ve gone to the movies, or out for dinner, or to visit Hector’s mom, and the empty sensation grows less severe. It works, for the most part, and as the melancholy eases she finds herself humming her assigned audition piece, under her breath at first and then slipping into fully fledged singing once she reasons there’s no one around for her to disturb.

The casting won’t be posted until next week but she figures it still can’t hurt to continue to prepare; it’s community theatre, so the bar wasn’t set especially high to begin with and the competition was predictably mixed, but she’s determined to make up for anything she lacks with sheer, unbridled enthusiasm. She may not be the world’s best singer, or dancer, but she would have to be in the running for the best student, at _least_ , and she plans to use every ounce of that ability to her advantage. If only she could have convinced Audra Levine to audition alongside her, she may have mustered up something worthy of a Tony out of sheer spite.

Fingers rapping restlessly on the benchtop, she keeps her thoughts geared firmly towards the positive, documenting every newly vacated space and trying to see it in terms of untapped potential; she’s always thought Heather’s canisters were ugly, and where Hector’s surfboard no longer rests against the wall in the passageway is now a place to hang some art. Perhaps there’d been something of merit buried beneath the pettiness that had driven her to redecorate on Nathaniel’s behalf after all. What was her entire life, now, but an empty space? Not a gaping chasm, or a void, as she’s coming to see; just an extra room, waiting for her to decide how fill it. Which was a little bit scary, yes, but ultimately kind of exciting, too.

In a strange burst of courage, she digs the still-unopened Bar letter out from where she’s stashed it at the back of the cupboard, sandwiched between two boxes of cereal, and hangs it up, front and centre, on her fridge. She’s still not quite ready to open it, but she thinks she might be, someday soon.

Stepping back to appraise her handiwork, her gaze shifts around the house—ready to catalogue any other opportunities for improvement—until it happens to slide over to the breakfast bar where Heather has left her copy of _Freaky Friday_ out for her on the counter, as requested, close to where she’s tossed her keys.

Not that Heather would ever believe it, but she even remembers to switch off all the lights again before she leaves.

 

* * *

 

It’s all still there, if she performs an emotional, full-body scan—the residual annoyance at his narrow-mindedness, the tender bruise of his betrayal. But she can’t deny the newfound depths of understanding she’s been afforded, either; or the way _I thought it would be easier on the both of us—that you’d made your feelings clear_ keeps swirling around inside her with a restlessness she can’t shake. She’s heard it a thousand times, from Dr Akopian and Dr Shin. Equally strong proponents of the school of _make your desires and intentions known._ For all Nathaniel’s cataloguable faults, she can’t accuse him of ever leaving her to wonder where she stood with him, and it’s a courtesy she’s come to realise she’s rarely afforded him in return.

He straightens up when he sees her, all at once solemn but eager, his lanky body filling up the frame of his open door. “Hey,” he says, all tentative, and she wants to hate the way most of the apprehension flows out of her in some kind of physiological Pavlovian reflex.

“Hey. Can I come in? I promise I’ll let you keep your clothes on, this time.”

It’s not the most appropriate of jokes to be making, all things considered, but she’s nervous, and there’s always been something reassuring to be found in the easy exchange of their back-and-forth—barbed or otherwise—and she finds herself desperate for its comfort now.

The laugh he huffs out is composed entirely of politeness, but he steps back and grants her entrance to just the same.

Nathaniel’s apartment has changed in the not-quite week since she’s been here last; a by-product of his botched relocation plans, she’s sure. There’s stacked boxes in the corner by the window, his bookcase disconcertingly bare. He’s apparently taken the opportunity to do some rearranging of his own, judging by the new orientation of the couch, now parallel to the perpendicular wall. She’s in the middle of debating approximately how cheeky it would be to ask if she could have the hippogriff-emblazoned bedspread he’s unsurprisingly replaced with his original, standard-issue slate-grey when her vision snags on the only discernible remnant of her flight of interior decorating fancy. Definitely the least obnoxiously coloured of the items with which she’d inundated his armchairs, a single oversized burgundy cushion is propped up in the middle of his arrangement of pillows at the top of his as-always, impeccably made bed. 

She doesn’t realise she was wringing her fingers until they stop very suddenly and _squeeze_.

“I want to tell you about my day,” she blurts out, in lieu of having anything else prepared.

Nathaniel’s eyebrows tick high up on his forehead. “Okay.”

She doesn’t know how else to explain the impulse to him in a way that makes it clear that she’s not just lonely or that her house feels empty without Heather or her boyfriend or her starfish by the sink; that those things are all part of it, but it’s not the whole truth, or even a majority share. That she could have called Paula, and that she will, but it isn’t the same driving force. Not if she’s being honest, which she’s really, really trying to be.

“I went to an audition today. For a musical revue. I had to sing, and dance, I know I’m not going to be the next Bernadette Peters, or Julie Andrews, or Patti LuPone. I know that. But I love musical theatre. I always have. And that should be a part of my life, right? Something that means that much to me—I should find a way to fit it in. So I’m going to. Fit it in.”

She thinks there might be a metaphor in there, somewhere, for how when it comes relationships she’s never quite managed to carry the tune. But she still has so much music inside of her, and—acting outside supernatural forces or not—that melody is no longer just her own.

“Okay,” Nathaniel says again, the twitch of his lips equal parts amused and bemused.

It’s one of the things she’s always liked about him, his ability to be so matter-of-fact. Feelings—having them, or talking about them—weren’t really part of how he’d been raised, but once that avalanche had been unleashed it had never really stopped, and though his emotional tunnel vision has been a big part of every time she’s had to step away, he’s never, not once, denied her access to the ones pertaining to her.

She wants to be right there with him, wants to hold on alongside him to the idea that the two of them have always been inevitable. But she knows that’s not the same as _not destined to come to an end._

“There’s something I never said to you, in our therapy session. And I think it’s important. Sometimes I think there’s a reason you were always so ready to whisk me away,” she says, quietly. “And it’s because you know that there’s a good chance you and I don’t work in the real world.”

Nathaniel’s shoulders pull taut, bracing themselves against the weight of Hawaii and all that followed hanging heavy between them. “Rebecca,” he objects. “We barely even got a chance to _try_.”

She holds up a finger, anticipating his protests. “That is also true, and honestly, I’ve been thinking about that, too. Look, I told you I was still trying to figure my life out and where you fit into it, and that is… still very much the truth,” she says slowly, looking down at her tangled hands. “But the past few weeks—and certain, shall we say… revelations—have done a good job of making me realise that I don’t like the idea of you not being in it at all.”

Some of the tension goes out of him at that, but he visibly sucks in a breath and holds it—like he’s waiting for her parting blow, the caveat that walks it all back.

“But dude, we have got _a lot_ of work to do. Both of us, not just me. You get that, right? A lot more than what’s going to be solved by one therapy session.”

“I spent a lot of money on self-help books,” he offers, unprompted, gesturing towards his shelves. “So much. An embarrassing amount. The really cheesy ones, that want you to chant out loud how much you believe in yourself at the mirror.”

Delighted laughter bubbles up out of her and she nods her comprehension; he’s always been good at that, at catching her off-guard, and making her laugh when she needs it most. She wants to believe he can be good at all the other stuff, too—that somehow, if they fumble through it together, their desire to make it work can win. 

“So here’s what we’re going to do—we’re going to date. A _lot_ , because we have eight months to make up for and you’re rich and you can afford it and if these pants are staying on I’m gonna need the distraction.” She sinks her teeth into her lower lip. “However, it’s recently been brought to my attention that in the past, a lot of our relationship has been executed on my terms. So, any additions?”

The expression on his face shifts a few times like a glitching television set, cycling through the stations until it settles on one, the picture still fuzzy and sprinkled with static. She can practically see him weighing up what she’s offering against the amount of times he’s been badly burned.

She knows all too well she’s conditioned him to take what he can get. She needs him to understand that he’s allowed to ask for more, now; that maybe she’s finally ready to give without leaving herself with nothing. That after surviving their whole impossible ordeal relatively unscathed, she thinks she might be able to let someone in without losing herself along the way.

“Just one, I think,” he says eventually. “More of a clarification, than an addendum. Is, uh… kissing still allowed?”

“Yeah,” she says with a relieved, breathless grin as she sashays closer. “Yeah, I think that’s allowed. And maybe, if you’re lucky, I might let you touch my boobs a little bit—just, like, over-the-clothes—since it seems too much of a shame not to put all this newfound knowledge we have of each other to good use. And I know how much you must miss these puppies.”

He quirks an eyebrow and brings a hand up to her side and rests it there, thumb stroking back and forth and just barely grazing the side of her breast. “Uh-huh. Tell Clyde I said hi.”

“Tell him yourself.”

He lets the hand slide around to her back until it’s splayed between her shoulder blades, tugging her gently closer as he slopes his face towards hers, their lips brushing lightly once, twice, three times before he draws back with a tiny nudge of his nose.

It’s warmth, rather than heat, that effervesces in her bloodstream, starting in her toes and rising until everything from about her stomach upwards is fuzzy, pleasant foam. She feels giddy and a little nervous, but it’s a tingle of anticipation, not apprehension, that runs through her as she looks up at him and goes loose his arms.

“Oh,” she says, heavy-lidded. “Good terms.”

“Thank you.”

And then she’s kissing him properly for good measure, surging up onto her tiptoes to get at him, because she’s missed this, missed _him_ , and being back in their bodies it feels foreign and familiar all at once, and a little bit like _welcome home._ Nathaniel matches her fervour eagerly, dipping to meet her in the middle, his fingers restless as they roam from her hair to her waist and everywhere in between.

Their mouths break apart but she’s not ready to release him, not just yet, so she buries her face in his neck and tightens her arms around it, making an embarrassing, needy squeak of a noise when his own fold firmly around her back, crushing her against him, holding her to him like he doesn’t quite believe her and he’s still afraid to let her go. She can feel the way the uneven breath he takes shudders right through him.

After a long moment she catches herself and reluctantly pulls back, letting her hands slide down his chest to return to her sides, her gaze sweeping the apartment as she gnaws on her lower lip. “So I brought a movie for us to watch—like _actually_ watch—but now I’m kind of thinking we should relocate to my living room, which doesn’t have a bed in it…”

“Oh, you mean your living room, in your house, in which you no longer have housemates?” he murmurs, smirking down at her, eyes darting teasingly to her mouth. “Where we’ll have the place entirely to ourselves?”

Her front teeth sink harder into her lip. “Uh-huh. Yeah.”

(Their track record for self control isn’t exactly great but he’s not worried—he figured out just how much it wasn’t about the sex for him a long time ago. This—the slowing down, the moments in between, the having fun with it—this is the part he’s been waiting for. The part where she finally stands still long enough for him to hold on to.)

“Sounds foolproof,” he tells her, and follows obediently when she tangles her hand in his and tugs him towards the door.


End file.
